AMD Intentionally Crippled Their HDMI Adapters

[MWisBest]

IANAL, but it's my understanding is that it is the actual board manufacturer (sapphire, diamond, etc.) that chooses to be HDMI compliant or not, not the asic vendor. The asic vendor provides an HDMI compatible chip and the board manufacturer chooses whether or not to utilize those capabilities in their board.

While the board manufacturer might pay for it as well (considering the fact that they can choose the connectivity of the GPU, be it 2 HDMI ports and 1 DVI port or 2 DVI ports and 1 HDMI port or whatever), AMD does make reference GPUs with HDMI. I honestly don't know how all of the licensing and whatnot stuff works, just wanted to throw my 2 cents in here.

[curaga]

The HDMI connector alone doesn't prove anything about the licensing, there exist several ARM boards that use HDMI for space reasons but only pass DVI signaling through it.