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IDF Fall 2003: Home entertainment includes new Intel processor for gamers

By Alun Williams - San Jose

Posted on 17 Sep 2003 at 09:51

'Home is where the business opportunity is' was the gist of a keynote given by Louis Burns, general manager of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group, entitled 'The Digital Home, Vision and Direction.

Citing the billions of dollars spent on home improvements and consumer electronics, he said Intel would increasingly target the home networking market.

The newest instance of this was the headline-grabbing announcement of a new Pentium 4 processor that is aimed specifically at gamers. Interacting with PCs, apparently, is one of our favourite home entertainments, and 'interaction' means gaming, as often as not.

The snappily-titled 'Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading technology Extreme Edition' (P4 HT EE) will initially run at 3.2GHz and have 2MB of level 3 cache. Expect it inside systems within 30-60 days, said Burns. The new processor will plug into the existing 865 875 chipset infrastructure, by the way.

Burns also formally unveiled the balanced Technology Extended (BTX) form factor specification, formerly codenamed 'Big Water'. It is intended to, eventually, supercede the ATX family of designs.

'Cool and quiet' was Burns' summation of BTX benefits - it should support improved heat management, performance and acoustics. Essentially, help build better PCs for the home.

And in what was billed as the first live demonstration of PCI Express x16 graphics (courtesy of ATI) on a Prescott machine, Burns claimed that PCI Express was making steady progress, even if products based on it will not appear until 2004.

In the demo he contrasted the new and old graphics performance for the Half Life 2 game. Look at the shadowing underneath the villain's eyes, he urged, but to this hack's eyes there was no great difference to be seen. Maybe you have to be a gamer to appreciate these things...

Burns also introduced the Intel 815 Digital Set Top Box Reference Design, to support video-on-demand over a broadband connection. In the demo it was working in conjunction with a Gateway LCD Media Center (based on Microsoft's forthcoming entertainment version of Windows).

Looking further into the future, Burns finished by demonstrating a technology that will not be available for a year or two. This is instant on/off power management. The obvious advantages are that PC will start sooner after the 'on' button is pressed and, if the PC loses power, the system can cope without losing data or rebooting the PC.