We talked to Fremont-based S3, which we guess could fairly be described as one of the smaller players in the PC graphics market.

But Ken Weng, a senior executive at S3 is perhaps surprisingly bullish about the company’s future – as far as we can tell it’s now a standalone unit.

S3 has just released its 500 Series graphics product and Weng said S3 has been working in the 64-bit space as a “proving ground to show OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] we have a solid product.”

One of S3’s recent wins is Fujitsu America, which is coming out with a 14-inch four pound notebook in the near future using the Chrome 400 series, said Weng.

Weng said that S3 has a team of engineers based in Fremont, Shanghai and Brazil who can produce a “world class GPU”. He said: “We’ve been working hard to solve the power consumption problem.” That affects S3’s competition and trade offs have to be made by them, he claimed.

He said: “We’re trying to carve out a position as one of the best performers per watt.”

Two or three years down the road, he said, OEMs are going to think very much harder about the suppliers they use for their product. “One of the things I’m working at is to getting to 10% [market share] in the next few years.”

He said that people are beginning to accept that graphics chips are not just aimed at PC gamers.  It’s hard to figure out if S3 is still connected with Taiwanese firm Via, but Weng said that it is working with Via on a project for small form factor machines called “Trinity”. He said that project is starting to gain some momentum in Asia and “with some of the more aggressive OEMs”.

And S3 is looking beyond PCs too, said Weng. He said: “We’re moving towards getting more exposure in not only the PC space but the consumer space as well,” he said. X