Sometimes it’s not easy being a journalist. I have deadlines, and I’m relatively new at ExtremeTech. When I make phone calls or blast emails, they don’t always get returned. Then, when a story goes live, everyone wants to talk to me.
Case in point: My survey of display interface technology. It focused mainly on the present, with a glance or two at the future, but the folks behind HDMI scrambled to get in touch with me to let me know that their connection tech, while it might not be as prominent today as VGA and DVI, is undergoing a major push.
I spoke with Joe Lee, the HDMI Evangelist, and Les Chard, the President of HDMI Licensing, to dig up some data about the technology, which is currently very popular in the flat-panel TV space but only a niche solution in the PC arena.
Chard made a bold prediction: “I could easily see HDMI [commanding] 30 to 40 percent of the total PC market by 2010.” How can that be? As a standard, HDMI is getting little press and has largely been written off as a TV—not a PC—technology.
Part of its appeal is that it’s completely backward-compatible to the current display connector du jour—DVI. Lee said, “HDMI is, for all intents and purposes, like DVI 2.0. It’s completely compatible, it’s just a physical connector change, and it can do all the high-speed stuff.” That means that an HDMI graphics card can easily talk to a DVI monitor. In fact, the card can host both DVI and HDMI ports while only being compatible with a single spec.
That makes HDMI an attractive next step for graphics chipset makers, motherboard makers, and monitor makers. HDMI isn’t a completely open spec, and it does come with a royalty to use it, but according to Lee the royalty amounts to four cents per product. Most consumers, he said, would prefer to pay the extra four cents in return for a spec that they’re already familiar with (from their HDTV entertainment centers), that’s backward compatible, and that’s an easy upgrade.
Once something gets integrated into a chipset, Lee said, it tends to take off. When technologies like USB and SATA made their way into the southbridge, they quickly became the prevalent specs, leaving IEEE 1394 and IDE, respectively, in the dust. Some graphics and motherboard chipset manufacturers are planning to integrate HDMI, and some monitors as well. A handful of PC products already contain HDMI ports, without relying on HDMI integration into the chipset.
To pave the way for widespread integration, Lee said, the folks behind the HDMI spec have been soliciting feedback from the PC chipset and card makers to find out, “What can we do to make this technology easier to use in your products?”
He added, “We’ve been taking their feedback, making changes to the spec. Hopefully we’ve got a track record that shows we do respond to the market’s needs, and we’ll continue to do that.”
Audio integration remains a gray area, but Lee assured me that HDMI audio and PCI or PCI Express audio cards can coexist peacefully. He even speculated that some graphics cards may, one day in the future, contain audio CODECs of their own. Continued…