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Technology Stocks : ATI Technologies in 1997 (T.ATY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NTT who wrote (3297)	5/2/1999 3:25:00 PM
From: Carnac	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5927

A $500 PC has a Pentium powerful enough for broadcast/cable TV analog-to-MPEG-2 encode and HDTV-rate decode ?!? The "HDTV decode" you claim is really nothing more than 24 fps fluffy film bitstreams at 1280x720, not the real 60fps or even 1920x1080x24 or full 1920x1088x30i HDTV requires the full power of a high-end Pentium just to VLD and motion vector reconstruction. Lame. I argue that a low cost Pentium (say Celeron) with reduced system memory (32 MB) etc. and FULL hardware support for HDTV decode is less expensive and provides a more pleasant experience for the $500 Media PC. The same is true for the digital VCR (encoder) configuration. MCP is inevitably in hardware to reduce L2 cache trashing, whereas the other stages of decode can at least live within L1. The coding efficiency of today's software-only encoders is lousy. Have you compared a 4 mbit/sec stream made by Ligos/MGI/etc. against one produced by a C-Cube DVExplore or Sony single-chip encoder ? The lower the bit rate for a level of video quality, the more hours on your hard disk will yield. Factor storage costs into the equation. Yes, once we have motion estimation and other analysis stages executed in hardware, with the rest on the host CPU, then we are talking inexpensive, quality encoding on the PC. I think we'll have a long wait as usual.

To: NTT who wrote (3297)	5/2/1999 4:07:00 PM
From: Stocker	Respond to of 5927

Carnac/NTT - Aren't you ignoring the sales aspect in favor of the technology. Many would argue it's as much about value or features for a good price, not only who has the best product now or in the future. The big money will be made by the companies that can combine value and tech and right now ATI's given the OEM market exactly what it wants. The others just don't have the capability. There is no guarantee they will in the future either, Intel or no Intel. It's just as much about quality, shipping, meeting volumes, financial stability, etc. ATI's shares don't seem to reflect much of a premium based on what's going to happen in the graphics market 3-5 years from now anyway. It's more the immediate future because, just as both of you can't agree on what's going to happen, neither can the market.