AMD's Live! vision of the Media Center PC

By Steve Malone

Posted on 5 Jan 2006 at 10:27

Chip maker AMD has announced that it is extending its digital entertainments technology out of the realms of professional media to consumers. The company says the first products under the AMD Live! banner are expected to appear in mid-2006.

Making the announcement at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the AMD Live! brand is expected to be a range of next-generation Windows Media PCs driven by Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors for desktop PCs, as well as AMD dual-core mobile processors for notebook PCs. The company suggests that when AMD Live! appears it will run Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and later the Windows Vista, also due sometime this year. AMD says the Live! platform will deliver a range of digital entertainment including music and video and will be able to store, access and manage a variety digital content.

The announcement may not be entirely unconnected with the official debut of Intel's very similar Viiv product line at the same show. Viiv is Intel's vision of a next-generation home PC which acts as the centre of a digital entertainment system. A fully networked system with support for strong DRM technologies, a Viiv platform PC will be able to communicate with a range of consumer electronic devices such as TVs, games consoles and DVD players.

As with the Intel announcement, AMD is painting a future where customers can extend their PC to stream music through their entertainment centre, view and share photos on the TV, burn recorded TV shows (MPAA and its associates permitting), videos, music and pictures to a DVD or CD, or transfer this same content to a notebook, MP3 player, portable media player or PDA.

AMD technology has, up until now, been ostensibly been targeted at the music and movie industries with people like Mark Knopfler and Lucasfilms used as a showcase for the company's range of 64-bit chips. The celebrities will doubtless be on hand to give their support when AMD Live! appears later this year.