David T. Metz said:
Not likely. It would be to expensive not to mention heat producing and
bulky in design. Wait for hdtv, which is digital. With digital
transmission it´s much easier to produce a card that can cope with all the
flavors.
Dav
Given that the differences between PAL/SECAM and NTSC hardware are minimal
(but still significant), I cant see how you'd say such a card would be to
large/bulky - sure the tuners and some related circuitry are different
inside but why cant the hardware be integrated in to one Global tuner (with
a simple adapter for the different antenna connectors used by PAL vs NTSC
countries)? The part that produces the most heat by far is the GPU and that
is the same on both cards. Judging by the amount of fan related "piffle" on
the new X800 AIW, I dont think ATI would claim they're that squeezed for
space on the boards. A large price difference would not be justified because
essentially all the same components would be used, there would just be some
duplication of cicuitry associated with the tuner and surface mount caps and
resistors cost just a few pennies/cents each. Certainly the initial design
work would be intensive but the long term payoffs for the company (stock
control/inventory management) I believe would justify that.
I'm not familiar with HDTV but do all countries use exactly the same format
for broadcast or are there differences? I cant see all counties swapping
over to HDTV quickly given that many areas in some countries dont even
receive the full range of channels on the analog range (I'm in this
situation and I live in the fairley well off - by international
standards -UK). The cost of infrastucture changes would surely be very high.
Paul