- Saturday, 14 November 2009
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I quote others in order to better express my own self - Montaigne
Intel's Viiv "is an embarrassment"
YOU DON'T SEE much about Intel's attempt to sew up the consumer market with its Viiv branding these days.
At the last Intel Developer Forum, we looked in vain for any reference to Viiv which appears to have become one of the Intel "disappeared".
Intel
has "disappeared" quite a lot of its ideas - not just the "Ottoman" PC that
Craig Barrett sat on at a Palm Springs IDF years ago - the number of the
disappeared is legion. We won't mention the Intel electron microscope, the Intel
"Hotels of Distinction" or the Intel music player. Oops, we just did.
Now market research firm Digdia has produced a report on "Consumer Electronics 3.0" which CEO Paul Otellini mentioned at his keynote speech at the last IDF.
Digdia reckons Intel spins it this way: CE 1.0 was the analogue era, CE 2.0 was when digital TV was invented. CE 3.0 is when the Internet gets married to TV.
So what was Viiv then? Digdia says in its report: "Viiv has proved to be more of an embarrassment than a benefit. Intel people seem to spend more time making excuses for Viiv than they spend trying to sell it."
Intel is having another crack at the whole topic again, the marketeers reckon. ยต
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It surely is an embarassment, and don't call me Shirley...

(Sorry I couldn't resist the Airplane quote)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSO0oMjYuqI

Hardly!
So...VIIV would be what then? I just figured it was "VI" = 6 and "IV" = 4 so this was Intel64. 
Which, granted, even AMD64 hasn't done anything memorable so far.
I'm friends with an Intel rep in my area who's pretty gung-ho about his company. When VIIV was first unveiled, I bet him that in a year we'd be sharing a big laugh about what a terrible idea VIIV was. 
I think it took slightly longer than a year, but that day has come, as expected.
... wasn't this the idea of a small, silent computer to use as a DVD player, PVR, etc.? 

Uh, yeah, sorry. I bought one of those tiny Apple boxes to do that stuff. Ooops. My bad. Well, it looked nicer, without all those stickers on the casing.
I actually saw a Viiv demo or two at all three of the IDF's this year. I don't think its dead yet.
VI IV may mislead you to think "64-bit", but it does not even run on 64-bit operating systems- only on 32-bit XP Media Center Edition and Vista Home Premium or Ultimate. As I found out the hard way after buiding a system with a so-called VIIV-ready motherboard and installing 64-bit Vista on it.