Digital home will see ultimate convergence

Intel is planning to enter the consumer electronic (CE) market in a big way. "Our PC market is 87 million and in next two years we expect it to be 100 million," said Donald J MacDonald, vice president and general manager, digital home group. Intel sees for itself a larger role in the consumer electronic market where "one billion consumer electronic devices is the potential."

In the consumer electronics market where integration is the buzzword, Intel plans to integrate functions and put them into a system-on-chip and also make a low power CPU. It is also working on the "media server concept" where all the applications from voice mail to television will be integrated.

Today computing, communications and consumer electronics converge in the digital home which allows consumer's devices to interoperate seamlessly.

"Our goal is to allow consumers to access digital content from any device, anytime, anywhere whether inside or outside the home," said MacDonald. For this Intel will lay greater stress on open standards. "They ensure interoperability between devices, regardless of the manufacturer," said MacDonald.

For this Intel plans to work with its Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) where players in the PC and consumer electronics industries will address the standards needed for the digital home. At present, Intel is working with Cisco and Motorola.

MacDonald said that research and development team in India was contributing in a big way to the Digital Home vision of Intel. The team in India is providing platform support for hardware and software. A large portion of the client software part is being done in India, he said.

Delivery is another big issue that Intel had to deal with. "For this, we can use WiFi and WiMAX technologies," he said. Intel is developing Viiv-based PCs to be surrounded and interoperable with a number of consumer electronics devices, software and online services including movies, music, photos and games.

Viiv-based PCs will be powered by a suite of Intel technologies including dual-core processors, platform chipsets and software as well as wired networking capabilities.