Diamond Multimedia is a company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced
graphics cards,
modems,
sound cards and
MP3 players. They were one of the major players in the 2D and early 3D graphics card competition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.Diamond Multimedia was merged (after a long-time companionship) with
S3, Incorporated in 1999. The merger was mostly due to S3's willingness to expand their trade from simply producing graphics chipsets to retail graphics cards. The act is somewhat similar with the 1999
3dfx purchase of
STB Technologies. The merger was hoped to boost the company's overall capabilities by combining the resources of S3 and Diamond, who were quite close partners over the preceding years. Unfortunately things did not go so well. The greatly anticipated
S3 Savage 2000 was a failure, and the excitedly growing 3D sound card market nearly fell apart with the loss of
Aureal Semiconductor.
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