Intel announces four PCIe platforms

ERIC KIM HAD the unenviable job of talking about the future of Intel's digital home strategy here.

Not that he did a bad job, but Intel can't seem to break out of the DRM infection trap it is in making the whole category useless and broken.

Everything it talked about was DRMed the the point of stupidity, but that doesn't seem to stop it. Maybe someday that will change and it will make something I want to buy, the software is out there, it just can't do it with Windows MeII and other DRM infected malware.

The first thing up was a disconnect between the TV and the internet. Both things deliver a lot of the same types of content, but will not talk to each others. This artificial break is brought to you by the letters D, R and M. Imagine that, the walled garden hurts both the providers and the users.

The things offered to fix this are so broken they are largely laughed at by consumers, and that is reflected in the adoption numbers or lack thereof. Until Intel gets this, their digital home strategy will remain as broken as it is now, and no transistor scaling can make up for that.

Moving on to gaming, the big news was Skull Trail, the upcoming X38 based gaming platform. Nothing much was said about it other than it supports quad core and has four PCIe slots. There was no word on whose graphics cards it supports, but you can bet it tends toward red not green. While red is fitting for IDF in Beijing, it must be pretty embarrassing for Intel.

Intel then went on to discuss the G965 and its video and games capabilities. If you look at the results from Tech Report, you can see how badly broken this chipset still is. The elephant is still in the room and has been ignored for so long he is angry.

From that dead horse it moved on to another, VIIV. Like its AMD cousin, Live!, both are so DRM infected that they are useless. Can we please move on from touting the rights removing DMAs as a great victory and spend the engineering efforts on things that don't actively hurt the user base?

DLNA, pronounced 'blight' is going to be moving on to the 3x series chipsets, be still my beating heart. Until it gets drivers working, this one also ranks as an avoid.

OK, it isn't all that bad. Intel is finally listening to the better part of a decade of user bitching and will bring mobile parts to the desktop. Santa Rosa DT, for Desktop is on the way for 2H 2008. Not much to say other than this will really allow for a huge advance in SFF and odd-format computers. This announcement is long overdue.

Remember the Intel Case Design contest? The winner, as judged by external experts and Paul Otellini, is the TriGem Lluon as the grand prize winner and the Asono Mesiro for first place. They won $700,000 and $300,000 respectively. Intel also announced that this will be an ongoing contest, look for details on the next one soon.

In the end, one last tidbit, Penryn gaming desktops will be launched at 3.33GHz. They demoed it with Yorkfield, and set it against a Kentsfield, both running video encoding. Since the encoder was compiled for SSE4 which Kentsfield lacks, the Yorktown finished in 18 seconds vs 29 for Kentsfield. Other less targeted apps will be lucky to hit 10% improvement overall.

The last thing Eric Kim talked about was bringing vPro to the home. It wants to launch vAmateur in 2008, but no details were given. I am sure I am not alone in thinking that giving the average Geek Squad member access to my machine is almost as scary as DRM.

In the end, the keynote convinced me that the whole home media centre PC concept is beyond saving. It was kicking a dead horse, which had a satisfying sound for a bit, but now it is just gooey and getting your shoes sticky.

Intel should either get rid of the DRM infections or give it up, simple as that. This whole long death of anything good that is even tangentially related helps no one and simply wastes money. Do it right or put a bullet in it. µ