That Scott Henson quote comes out often. Amir Majidimehr, Corporate Vice
President, Microsoft Corporation, Consumer Media Technology Group, Mobile
and Embedded Devices Division (gasp) says this about that exact article:
"The article is wrong unfortunately. HANA/ANA are video encoders, not
scalers. You basically have a bunch of pixels in memory ready to be
displayed and you must convert it to the appropriate standard, whether it is
composite, component, etc. You need to clock the samples are the right rate
and format the signal (including modulating it for some of the output
formats) before you can hook it up to you TV/monitor."
I also asked him this question to research the 360 Elite article as I
assumed the Henson article to be accurate too:
"Does the Xbox 360 Elite's HANA scaling chip use the same bilinear scaling
algorhythm as the old ANA chip in the original console?"
To which he replied: "Hana (or ANA) is not used for scaling in 360. Instead,
the graphics processor (GPU) is used to do the scaling. I won't disclose the
internals of the filter but it is not bilinear at all. It is much more
sophisticated than that with far more taps. Given where the hardware is, the
scaling logic is the same in both products."
As ATI GPUs typically use four or six tap lanczos scaling, that was the
educated guess I put into the article as I very much doubt ATI would create
an all-new scaling system just for Xenos.
