Daily Blog – John E. Johnson, Jr. – March 8, 2008: HIGH END VIDEO COMING TO MOTHERBOARDS.

A couple of days ago, the news reported that AMD is finishing a chip for computers that will replace the high end video cards (except for the absolute extreme cards) that will be able to handle all of the things that the high end cards do, including fast 3D computations. The news was meant for gamers, but I see it as a step towards less expensive media servers where movies (film) can be input as 24 fps, and interpolated to at least 72 fps with two frames calculated in between each of the native frames. We are already beginning to see this in outboard video processors and at least one flat panel HDTV, but having it in an on-board single chipset in media servers would be a big step forward in bringing media serving to the masses at very affordable prices.

This is especially so now that 1 TB hard drives are relatively inexpensive (about $330). A 1 TB drive will hold about 20 HD movies (25 GB each), 30 SD movies, and your entire CD collection. So, a home built media server would be $100 for the case, $50 for the power supply, $150 for the motherboard, $200 for the RAM, $300 for the drive, and $200 for the operating system. Using the eventual HDMI output jack that will appear on new motherboards, away you go for $1,000. The critical factor will be the user interface. There are some out there now, but they are not very user friendly. Wanna be billionaires should get started writing the world’s greatest media server user interface today.