It would appear that sometimes ATI's All-In-Wonder series are seen as the jewel in the crown of ATI's desktop line, while other times they appear to receive short shrift in terms of development and reach the market much, much later than their standard brethren.

These longer design periods probably occur on the technology transitions. With AGP the form graphics chip was limited in terms of positioning on the board, which makes life more difficult with the older analogue "can" tuner and high end graphics chip requiring hefty cooling. Then, when a new multimedia device is required for it to stay competitive with separate add-in boards a large software effort, outside the normal Catalyst updates, is required.

Now though, PCI Express has helped alleviate some of the form factor issues, allowing for greater flexibility in terms of graphics chip placement, and newer silicon tuners have also reduced the PCB footprint of the tuner element. For the last few All-In-Wonder releases the multimedia functionality has stayed fairly static, with the development of support to DBV-T tuners, allowing ATI to release All-In-Wonder X1800 in a fairly short time from the release of the standard X1800. With X1900 being pin compatible with X1800 and all the multimedia features staying the same the All-In-Wonder X1900's time to market was even shorter still.