X-bit labs

The Strong Dedication to the Quality: Interview with John Byrne of AMD Graphics Product Group (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/24/2007 | 04:18 PM ]

AMD’s Future Graphics Products

X-bit labs: What has happened to All-in-Wonder lineup of graphics cards? We haven’t seen an update for over a year right now and AIWs are hard to find even at http://ati.amd.com. Did you decide to discontinue the AIW family?

John Byrne: There are no current plans for new products on the roadmap. Our focus at this time is on stand-alone TV tuners. Of course we do reserve the right to use the brand in the future if the opportunity presents itself. 

X-bit labs: Would you expect AMD’s graphics products group to resurrect the All-in-Wonder lineup in future by adding HDTV/DTV capabilities and other interesting features that may attract attention of multimedia users to the AIW family?

John Byrne: It’s certainly under consideration and we may choose to pursue it at another date. We’ll certainly keep you up-to-date of all news in this area.

X-bit labs: What do you think about the practice of offering pre-overclocked graphics cards and do you plan to allow your partners to increase speeds of your performance-mainstream and enthusiast-class offerings going forward?

John Byrne: It’s a great way to attract enthusiasts. One of the most noticeable examples is allowing partners to pre-overclock even the high-end graphics cards: a lot of users do want to have highest performance graphics cards, but do not want to take a risk and/or lose warranty by overclocking the boards themselves.  We have several partners that have chosen to do this.

X-bit labs: Do you think it makes sense to sell standalone graphics cards for notebooks in the retail, considering the popularity of notebooks with gaming capabilities?

John Byrne: It depends on whether the card is internal or external. With internal upgrades, the challenge is allowing users to crack open their laptops and doing it themselves. Warranty issues make this challenging for manufacturers.  External graphics options are certainly technically feasible.

X-bit labs: Recently Asustek Computer introduced an external graphics card for laptops. Perhaps, this is a way to go when customers want to have higher graphics power on their mobile systems? Maybe AMD has plans to offer a standard reference design for external graphics cards for notebooks or evend desktops?

John Byrne: As you know, we don’t comment on future products, but that’s a really interesting idea.

X-bit labs: ATI was the first to introduce native PCI Express 1.0a graphics cards (and to validate for the 1.1 standard too). When do you plan to support the PCI Express 2.0 specification with future products that natively support the new interconnection tech? Do you think PCIe 2.0 ramp up will be quicker compared to 1.0a's?

John Byrne: We don’t comment on unannounced products, so I can’t say when we’ll be launching PCIe 2.0 products, beyond the fact that we’ll be ready to support the extra bandwidth of 2.0 once chipsets are available. It’s hard to predict whether take-up will be faster or slower than before. PCIe 2.0 is backwards compatible with 1.0[a], so the transition is likely to be invisible to most people.

X-bit labs: Your colleagues from ATI believed that we’ll see the first systems with DisplayPort in early 2007, though, they are nowhere around now. When do you think the market in general and the channel market in particular will be ready for DisplayPort? When do you think GPUs will support the technology natively?

John Byrne: That was given that DP1.0 was ratified a year ago. However, DP1.1 came along and changed plans. DP1.1 will be ratified very soon and products are expected later this year.

X-bit labs: Would you expect the price of high-end graphics cards to rise in future and make high-performance gaming PCs even more expensive that now?

John Byrne: Unfortunately, we don’t comment on future pricing.