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

To: NTT who wrote (3324)	5/3/1999 6:56:00 PM
From: Carnac	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5927

Whole startups have built complete working MPEG-2 decoder silicon for less than $1M. You're right. It might take ATI, with the usual graphic controller mentality, more money to pull off one function block. And no, there should be no gaps between VLD and IDCT. All symbolic token processing is included in my definition of VLD. MCP and IDCT are the DSP stages. Umm, there's a lot more to decoding macroblocks than VLD if your hardware only accelerates the DSP stuff. It's not a simple linear relationship with your AVERAGE bitrate. That is, an 18.5 mbit/sec 1920x1080 bitstream is not just 2x harder to decode than a 9.25 mbit/sec DVD bitstream. Try 3x or 4x. You must command the h/w accelerator for each and every macroblock. That part at least scales with the sample rate increase, which is 6x in this case. A probable reason software DVD players still exist with high ASP's: simply another way to milk a few extra dollars from the OEM. I'm sure ATI shares part of the software DVD royalties with Quadrant. Would they get this with a totally integrated DVD solution which can plug almost directly into DirectShow ? Yes Quadrant had the best quality as of a few months ago. That will probably change soon. It's always "king of the mountain" here in Cyberia slave camps of low-margin motherboardland. This is a cash strapped business. ATI could barely afford the $70M for Chromatic. Yet they are #1 in this business. Nvidia has a relationship with SGS-Thomson that can give them both a x86 core and dedicated MPEG decoder silicon, and misc. goodies such as frame buffer compression. They have other plans including geometry acceleration in h/w which I'm sure ATI is planning to match. I mentioned the STI-3500 because it is an example of a chip similarly priced to a Rage Pro, and has a lot more than 10% of its gate count. I'm sure ST doens't sell as many 3500's as ATI sells RP.. The graphics controller business won't be around as we know it in a few short years. With such low margins, one mistake, and you're gone.