HDMI licence costs four cents per device

WE already told you how much Intel makes out of the HDCP licence. You can check the original story here. Intel wants half of a cent per device plus a membership fee. HDMI is actually a bit more expensive and it will cost you four cents per device.

There is a catch as you have to pay $10,000 to the HDMI governing body also known as HDMI Licensing, LLC. It will provide a licence, specification and documentation. You have to renew the licence every year.

Usually, the chaps such as Silicon Image pay for the licensing fee and bury the cost in the chip design costs. We think that Nvidia and ATI's partners have to play the $10,000 membership fee as we remember that Abit told us that it had to do it in order to put HDMI on its motherboards.

A low-cost graphic card with HDMI is already a reality and Sapphire has one for as low as €114 for the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X1300 XT/X1600 Pro, while MSI has the MSI NX7600GT Diamond Plus, Geforce 7600 GT, €180.00.

As interest is growing, there will be more of these cards to follow, based on Nvidia and ATI chips. µ