Introduction

Godfrey and Brandon work together

Today we have an interview with ATI's Director of Marketing for Multimedia products, Godfrey Cheng. This interview was done with me providing Brandon a list of questions to ask ATI. The questions are in bold text, ATI's answers follow, and then I've added my personal comments in italics (which ATI has not seen). So, without further ado:

FiringSquad: Why don’t you tell our readers about yourself? i.e. What do you do for ATI, how long have you been working there, what was the greatest achievement you’ve seen at ATI, and the biggest mistake at ATI you’ve seen.

Godfrey Cheng: My name is Godfrey Cheng and I am a Libra. I would consider playing poker professionally except that working at ATI rocks. I am the Director of Marketing for Multimedia products (anything with a Wonder suffix) and I am also responsible for driving all Media & Video initiatives. I have been with ATI since 1998. The greatest achievement that I have seen at ATI was when we delivered the Radeon 9700 Pro to the market and put nVidia into a state of shock & awe. The biggest mistake that I have seen at ATI was the Rage Fury Maxx…..not because of the product, only because everybody in Asia pronounced it “Rage Furry Maxx”. We are heading for good times again.. watch…

FiringSquad: It seems like AVIVO can be summarized into these categories:
1. Capture of the source (DTV products, Theater 550 products)
2. Video processing (which consists of compute offload (MPEG-2, H.264) and quality enhancements (deinterlacing, noise reduction))
3. Display (10-bit output, HDMI, HDCP)
4. Software (Catalyst Control Center)
Are we missing anything?

Godfrey Cheng: This is accurate….. All these steps above, represent roughly what we call the Video Pipeline. Before any video is actually seen by a customer, there are a finite series of steps that must occur to process and display the video. Any errors or weak links in any one of these steps results in these errors being propagated further down the chain resulting in poorer video quality. Avivo is a platform of technologies designed to systematically improve each and every step listed above. While we are focusing on primarily HD H.264 decoding, De-interlacing & scaling, complete 10 display processing and 2 Dual Links this time…..we may talk about new TV products or mobile technologies the next time we talk about Avivo technologies. The one constant is that we are going to systematically invest in each and every step of the video pipeline to deliver the best video & display quality on the PC.