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Rumor: ANA/HANA Chip is no Hardware Scaler Chip - Upscaling by Xenos?
>> I already reported about this article yesterday, but something interesting was pointed out to me today ... the EuroGamer article reviewing the Xbox360 Elite contains this blurb on page2:
[QUOTE]
The only other major change under the bonnet is the new HANA video display chip, replacing the old ANA version in the classic 360. This chip has erroneously been described as the silicon that deals with the 360's inbuilt hardware scaling. In truth, Microsoft has now confirmed to us that it's merely a video output chip - a means of transferring the framebuffer into all of the different signals: composite, s-video, RGB SCART, component, VGA and - the key addition with HANA - HDMI. Scaling itself is actually performed by the Xenos GPU (most likely using a variation of Lanczos resizing) so in that respect the Elite performs identically to the original Xbox 360. The presence of HANA confirms that there will be no aftermarket HDMI solution for the current model.
[/QUOTE]
This is contradicting what Microsoft told Arstechnica in a January article about the ANA chip:
[QUOTE]
"We call it Ana. This is the scaling chip that's in the 360," he tells me.
"It was a critical design decision; we wanted the 360 to be high-definition, not just 1080p or some other standard. That's why we included component cables in the box; there is no HDTV that doesn't have a component in," said Greenburg.
They assume that Sony didn't include a hardware scaler to keep costs down, but get a little cagey when I ask how much it costs to put Ana into the 360. "This isn't a $1,000 scaler," Henson says, "but it's a good one."
[/QUOTE]
Now both Arstechnica and Eurogamer are pretty 'trusted' sources, they wouldn't just report MS told them something without this being true ... so I guess either one MS spokespersons was ignorant or they are pulling a 'Sony' on us.
If the Eurogamer article is correct, I guess the ANA/HANA chip is just a video encoder (to vga, component, hdmi etc). If scaling is done by the ATI Xenos GFX chip, I wonder if it has any kind of performance impact (probably not, at least I hope so for MS PR ;)) or if it can upscale at 'no cost' like it does with anti-aliasing.
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