It was with these financial, competitive and time constraints in mind that design on the NV3 began in 1996. This chip would eventually be commercialised as the RIVA 128, standing for "Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator" followed by a nod to its 128-bit internal bus width, which was very large for the time. NVIDIA retained SGS-Thomson (soon to be STMicroelectronics) as their manufacturing partner, in exchange for SGS-Thomson cancelling their competing STG-3001 GPU. In a similar vein to the NV1, NVIDIA was to sell the chip as "NV3" and SGS-Thomson was to white-label it as STG-3000, once again separated by audio functionality; however, NVIDIA convinced SGS-Thomson to cancel their own part and stick to manufacturing the NV3 instead, which later proved to be a terrible decision when NVIDIA dropped them in favor of TSMC for manufacturing of the RIVA 128 ZX due to both yield issues and pressure from venture capital funders. ST went on to manufacture the PowerVR Kyro series of GPU chips before dropping out of the market entirely by 2002.
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