Intel Moving Into Digital Living Room
It’s flat and sleek, designed to slide into a home entertainment cabinet and replace a DVD player, CD player and stereo tuner. It can be operated from the couch with a remote-control clicker, allowing full access to a library of music, movies, home videos and other digital entertainment.
If chip maker Intel Corp. has its way, it is the device that finally will move the personal computer into the heart of the home.
The Santa Clara, Calif., company’s vision -- dubbed the entertainment PC, or EPC -- is set to make its debut next week with machines from Hewlett-Packard Co., Fujitsu Ltd. and others.
PC makers have spent years trying to get their machines out of home offices, dens and bedrooms and into living rooms. So far, they’ve had little success.
Microsoft Corp.’s Media Center software for recording TV shows, burning DVDs and managing music was installed on only 300,000 of the 56.5 million home computers sold worldwide last year, according to market research firm IDC.
Meanwhile, the set-top boxes that manage feeds from satellite TV and digital cable are getting smarter, with an eye toward expanding into other forms of home entertainment. So are digital video recorders like those made by TiVo Inc. The next generation of video game consoles, due in a few years, also will have the chops to manage entertainment networks for the home.
Intel, whose chips were in about 44 million PCs sold to consumers around the world last year, has a vested interest in making sure none of these upstart devices supplant the role of the home computer. So it has become more aggressive about designing a device that can be the center of someone’s entertainment world, acting as a hub to gather, store and play digital media.
“If you’re Intel, you want to make silicon and get it integrated into as many devices as you possibly can,” said Steve Vonder Haar, research director of Interactive Media Strategies in Arlington, Texas. “The digital living room is a bold new frontier for Intel -- and a mega-opportunity if they’re able to convert.”
Far from being noisy towers with prominent floppy disk drives, EPCs resemble bulked-up DVD players and are just as quiet. They are expected to start at less than $1,000 each.
And they are workhorses. An EPC can download a movie from the Internet while Mom watches it, record a ballgame for Dad to watch later, beam photos from last week’s slumber party to a daughter’s room and stream music into a son’s room -- all at the same time.
An EPC can also provide a cleaner look for the home. When Jennifer Lashua, Intel’s marketing manager for consumer desktops, recently moved into a condominium with a smaller living room than her previous home, she barely had room for her VCR, DVD player, stereo, CD player, amplifier, cable box and the morass of accompanying wires. She also wanted to get a personal video recorder.
“An entertainment PC can replace all of them,” she said. “And my CD and DVD machines are players only, but an EPC burns both” CDs and DVDs.
Scott Blair, who works in marketing for Intel’s platform architecture group, played a Norah Jones song in high-definition audio on an EPC. That would have taken up 90% of the processing power of a Pentium 2 chip, 50% of a Pentium 3 and 22% of an early-generation Pentium 4, he said.
But with the newest Pentium 4 chips and their multi-tasking technology, known as hyperthreading, playing the song uses less than 3% of the chip’s processing capacity. Hard-drive memory has also grown exponentially, from a gigabyte or two in 1995 to 250 gigabytes or more today.
Intel recognized about three years ago that people increasingly were using PCs to manage their music, photos and videos. But it was only this year that all the pieces came together to make the EPC feasible.
Chief among them was Intel’s new Grantsdale chipset -- basically, chips and circuitry with specific functions that support the main microprocessor -- which the company calls the most significant makeover of the PC platform in more than a decade. The Grantsdale enables high-definition audio as well as better processing of wireless data and complex video playback.
“We needed to develop technology to allow people to do things they want to do,” said Bill Lezinske, Intel’s director of digital home marketing and planning.
Intel hired Tatung Co. of Taiwan to build an EPC prototype. Then Intel showed it to several computer makers, demonstrating how the device could represent a completely new iteration of the PC. The computer companies were free to design their own versions, or Tatung could build one for them.
Hewlett-Packard, for one, was quick to embrace the EPC concept. Two years ago, the Palo Alto-based company introduced a first-generation Media Center PC. It continued to tinker with ideas for a PC that would consolidate entertainment functions. Focus groups revealed that consumers were interested in such a machine.
“There was a need for a product in the living room to manage entertainment, but that had the horsepower and performance of a PC,” said Ameer Karim, HP’s director of worldwide product marketing.
HP won’t say much about its Digital Entertainment Center, due out Oct. 12. But Karim expects the market to grow steadily as consumers come to understand what the machines can do.
“We think people will take advantage of the fact that they can sit back on their couch and do all their entertainment and PC functions with one device,” he said.
Analysts caution that it may take awhile to get there, though. Roger Kay of IDC estimates that it will be 2008 before EPCs account for 25% of the global consumer PC market.
However long the shift takes, Intel intends to be at the forefront.
Although it has no plans to sell Intel-brand computers, the company is developing and promoting industry standards for audio reproduction, memory access and even technology for quieter cooling fans.
“It may be a surprise that we’re setting standards and directions for the industry,” said Intel’s Lezinske, “but that’s a very important function for us.”
And it will only get more important as Intel searches for new areas of growth, said Van Baker, an analyst with research firm Gartner Inc. in San Jose.
“Intel’s task is to advance platforms that need a lot of computing power,” he said.
“That’s what helps them sell chips.”
