As expected the most likely cause is the company's reaction to the global economic slowdown, with depleting market-share and profitability. While normally companies look to sustain operations post such workforce reductions in pursuit of growth, in the case of S3 Graphics, this instead puts the development of the company's next-generation graphics processor (GPU) in uncertainty, as portions of the engineering departments weren't immune to the reductions either. Currently, S3 Graphics with its Chrome 500 series graphics accelerators are eying its share of the entry-level discrete graphics market, with its products designed for HD entertainment, GPGPU and 3D acceleration. The graphics technologies of S3 have been in use by its parent company for years, with its chipset products. S3's next-generation graphics processor is expected to incorporate newer manufacturing technologies from Taiwan-based foundry companies.