Moving closer to the Digital Home

By Alun Williams

Posted on 10 Sep 2002 at 13:14

Intel kicks off its Developer Forum with an announcement of an Extended Wireless PC Initiative and a demo of a 3GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading.

The processor giant describes the initiative as the first step in delivering on its Digital Home strategy. The idea is to help developers - via reference designs and toolkits - to distribute digital media around the TVs and stereos in a home.

'Consumers really value the power and flexibility of digital media, whether they're taking digital photos, creating MP3 music files or recording family events on digital video, and the PC has become the universal and indispensable tool for storing and editing digital media,' said Louis Burns, VP of the Intel Desktop Platforms Group. 'The goal of the Extended Wireless PC Initiative is to take consumers one step closer to the vision of Digital Home by allowing them to sit back, relax and enjoy their favourite digital media throughout their home.'

To be more specific, Intel is committing itself to the development of 'digital media adapters' and extended wireless PC platforms by the summer of 2003. And the immediate releases are a sample digital media adapter reference design (which is based on the Intel XScale micro-architecture PXA210 applications processor, supporting the use of JPEG, MP3, and WMA digital content over an 802.11b wireless network), technical specifications describing an experimental 'media distribution software stack' (based on Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology for easy access to a PC's digital content) and a multi-platform UPnP toolkit.

More info can be found at developer.intel.com/technology/digitalhome.

The opening keynote at the Developer Forum was given by Intel president Paul Otellini, where he showcased a 3Ghz Pentium 4, which is promised before the end of the year. Interestingly, it features the Hyper-Threading (HT) technology currently found in enterprise-based servers. This allows a multithreaded program to run as though it had an extra processor at its disposal, and Intel claims that it will provide a cost-free, 25 per cent improvement in performance for mainstream consumer applications.

Otellini was also bullish about the state of IT. Despite the computing and communications industries going through 'their largest correction in history' he believed 'investments in emerging technologies, exciting products and more robust infrastructure continue'.

Citing silicon as 'the engine of convergence' - stating that 90-nanometer silicon technology will bring logic and communications capabilities together on Intel's manufacturing lines for the first time - he believes: 'We are on the cusp of creating exciting new technologies that allow all computers to communicate and all communication devices to compute. This will be fuelled by silicon advances that enable new levels of integration.'