Interview with ATI's Godfrey Cheng - It's all about the beans

[Steve]

Rys: "The tough question first. When we met in September last year, we spoke about the imminent release of Theatre 550 PRO and All-In-Wonder X800. It's taken nearly five months since then for them to be ready for sale in Europe and the rest of the world. Can you outline the biggest issues that caused the delays for both products?"

Godfrey: I'll start with All-In-Wonder. Basically we've added some entirely new features to the latest AGP All-In-Wonder, like SCART output, DVI and VGA on the backplane and FM tuning. All three of those things have to work together and work well, along with everything else the All-In-Wonder has to do. There's also been a lot of unforseen localisation work involved to bring, especially the TV functionality, the product to different markets with different TV standards, so it's been a bunch of work to get that done, more than we anticipated.

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD0xMDMz

[e.lectronick]

While it's always nice to hear news from ATI, I kind of feel like these questions were friendly lobs that didn't ask the truly "tough questions" we wanted to know the answers to.

Q:"Why didn't we see the AIW X800XT come equipped with the 550 Pro chip?"

Q:"How do you respond to the user's and reviewer's criticism of the lack of features or configurability in the bundled Cyberlink software? What are ATI's plans to open up possibilities for other 3d party developers to create their own applications for the card?"

Q:"Do the advanced capabilities of the Chip benefit those capturing to non MPEG2 format (AVI)?"

Q:"C'mon, give us the scoop. So your customer base doesn't have to do any more hand wringing over whether or not to buy the 550 pro, does ATI ever have plans to offer the chip on another AGP AIW card? Or, will any card sporting the 550, be PCIx16? I for one would like to wait for an AGP 8x to come out, but I can't wait forever, and I'm certainly *not* throwing away my brand new MB just for the sake of this chip." Hell, I'll go to Hauppauge before I do that.

-E