“Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, outlined plans to bring a wide range of content, from sports to first-run movies, to anyone with a broadband Internet connection and a remote control using its new Viiv PC platform, during a Thursday night keynote at the 2006 CES. While it incorporates new hardware and software, including Intel’s latest Core Duo and Pentium D 900 series chips, Viiv represents the company’s larger effort to bring together a variety of content and display it on a range of devices, including televisions and handhelds.” In addition, Intel teamed up with Google to provide video content for the Viiv platform.
Intel should have waited with the new processor names until they have a genuinely new processor architecture with the upcoming Merom/Conroe.
Meanwhile, Yonah could have been marketed as what it is: an improved, dual-core version of the Pentium M, e.g. as “Pentium M2”.
But apparently the 32-bit Yonah and the 64-bit Merom/Conroe are going to use the same names, so there’s going to be quite some confusion.
Or perhaps Merom/Conroe will be called Core64 or Core Pro or something like that?
This is purely supposition, but it seems plausible that putting Yonah under the Core moniker has a certain marketing value that Intel sees as beneficial. First since Core is new and not associated with laptops, a VIIV computer with a Yonah processor doesn’t receive designation as “containing a mobile processor” by those that might associate the Pentium M with being a low-performance mobile processor. You can’t have a slow laptop-chip in your media PC!
There’s also the possibility that the Apple rumors are true and that there is an iminent release of the first x86 Macs afoot. I’ve seen in certain Mac-related forums a tendency to not see Yonah under Core as a Pentium M. It’s possible that an “iBook featuring Intel’s new Core processor” is a little more sexy for the Mac user than an “iBook featuring Intel’s dual-core Pentium M.”
I’m sure I’m missing some obvious marketing gimmicks here. You get the idea, though.
Whether it will cause any problems, is hard to say. There really isn’t a lot of x86-64 software running around for people that aren’t already capable of discerning between Yonah and Memrom/Conroe.
This is purely supposition, but it seems plausible that putting Yonah under the Core moniker has a certain marketing value that Intel sees as beneficial.
Yep, certainly. But they’re only trading marketing impact now for impact of the new architecture later on, and they risk a lot of confusion doing that. I guess they were desperate for a positive story after Netburst has been whacked all over the place for so long.
There really isn’t a lot of x86-64 software running around for people that aren’t already capable of discerning between Yonah and Memrom/Conro
True, but there’ll already be more when Merom&Conroe come out in half a year. And there’ll be a lot more with Vista debuting in 64-bit.
And it’s not just the 64-bitness; Merom&Conroe should also be faster with 32-bit code than Yonah at the same clock.
Intel is probably eager to move beyond NetBurst, but the inclusion of the Pentium D in the media lineup suggests that they may be more interested in moving beyond the appearances of NetBurst. They’re in a market-dominating position despite a strong disparity between the efficacy of their desktop and mobile offerings in comparison to AMD’s products. For 2006 they’re bringing out the new brand names, the new logos, and basically any-other marketing material they can muster. It’s something of a calculated risk to launch new platforms without the actual microarchitecture for it, but as I said the amount of mainstream x86-64 software is relative small and will probably remain so for the lifetime of the products being sold. ISVs are not going to shoot themselves in the feet and ignore the current platform install-base.
Conroe/Merom will almost certainly be more capable than Yonah, but that isn’t a new event. It is a given to the consumer that newer top-of-the-line processors will be faster than older ones. The designations used for each processor will match this, rather than the clockrate of the processor.
Pentium D seems out of place in a HTPC… They should have choosen Yonah instead methinks…
The Viiv concept is good though IMO, as it will make it easier both for MCE-users and users of free alternatives(as it will be easier to target the Viiv-plattform for Linux kernel devs and the developers of MythTV for example)
Would be nice to pick up a Viiv PC and be certain that it will work with Linux and MythTV(sorta like Centrino laptops today, altough with laptops there’s the problem with suspend etc so it isn’t such a good example).
Usually their catchy names are nothing more than a processor and some chip on the motherboard and some crappy software thrown on top… What’s this Viiv exactly, in two words?
Media platform.
It’s trying to do for media PCs what Centrino did for laptops. And inspite of all the fluff it basically does boil down to an Intel processor, a few chips on the motherboard and some software requirements.
“It’s trying to do for media PCs what Centrino did for laptops” – yeah, only the term “media PC” is even harder to explain. What is it? A small PC with a remote control, that has TV output? Hmm… Perhaps there should be more to it than hardware… Different mentality maybe.
Different software, at least in the case of Windows. Most media centres that use Windows run the Media Centre Edition. But when it boils down to it, media PC’s are simply the ones that are used much like home entertainment systems were before. They would be primarily used for:
– Watching TV
– Watching Movies
– Playing Music
– Playing Games
and they would be found in living rooms, plugged into televisions, projectors or big monitors. That’s my interpretation of “media PC” anyway.
Seems that, again, Intel is this year’s “dust in your eyes” prize winner.
A jolly stroll over
http://www.intel.com/products/viiv/description.htm
revealed very little about Viiv except that:
– It puts “someone” in a firmer control of my media.
– It contains no additional “usefull” functionality.
(TV tunners / Remote etc are external to the tech)
– Intel add some sort of DRM to make content provides eager and willing.
Which part of this “breakthrough” am I supposed to be excited about? Need input