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Intel rolls out Viiv technology, dual-core laptop processors - Page 3

post #81 of 109
1/8/06 at 3:05pm
As far as Viiv.

Mostly to me sounds like a marketing thing, more than distinctive product.

Intel seems to take elements that already exist combining them together and calling it Viiv.

I don't see this as something big Apple has to jump onto.
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post #82 of 109
1/8/06 at 3:16pm
Quote:
Originally posted by TenoBell
From what I understand HyperTransport allows the bus to double pump (double data rate) which continues to sends data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal.

So even at the same speed a bus with HT can send send more data than a bus without HT.

That's why I always compare throughput (which is measured in GB/s) instead of speed (measured in MHz). BTW, Intel's FSB is quad-pumped. But HT is mostly irrelevant to the performance of Athlon systems since memory accesses do not traverse the HT link. IMO you should compare Intel's FSB throughput against AMD's integrated memory controller throughput, which is what I did in my previous message.
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post #83 of 109
1/8/06 at 3:55pm
Quote:
Originally posted by TenoBell
As far as Viiv.

Mostly to me sounds like a marketing thing, more than distinctive product.

Intel seems to take elements that already exist combining them together and calling it Viiv.

I don't see this as something big Apple has to jump onto.

Then you simply don't understand what Viiv is. It's a powerful 64-bit dual core CPU with a lot of technology built in that ordinary PCs simply don't have. It's made to effortlessly deal with HDTV, DRM (in hardware), real time codec decompression in hardware, and is made to deal with a wide variety of media formats that'll be used on the Web and that you can view on a TV. It has integrated wireless technologies. It's made to be used in the living room attached to the TV and stereo system. It's the ultimate digital media hub that can run Mac OS X or Windows MCE or Vista.

Intel Viiv Technology
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post #84 of 109
1/8/06 at 4:19pm
Originally posted by TenoBell
From what I understand HyperTransport allows the bus to double pump (double data rate) which continues to sends data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal. ...So even at the same speed a bus with HT can send send more data than a bus without HT.

heh. that's why i feel awesome running my overclocked amd venice 3000+ (2.20ghz cpu speed) rig at 245mhz bus speed 5x hypertransport. it could be reported as "1.225mhz front side bus" (which is great in its own right) but really its running 2.45 megatransports? (is that MT abbreviation that AMD uses?) per second... i wonder how i obtain a figure of what that means in throughput of Gbytes or Gbits per second
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post #85 of 109
1/8/06 at 4:24pm
Lets hear it for by the looks of it Intel's already well spent marketing dollars

All ViiV is is a sticker that you can attach, accompanied by some money for marketing, if your system meets some basic guidelines, which include a lot of Intel parts. A 64 bit processor is not actually one of them as Yonah is a usable solution. You can build a ViiV computer with entirely off the shelf components. Intel is just trying to make people associate their brand name with home theatre PCs.

Not saying it's a bad idea I'm just saying there's nothing new in the technology that you couldn't already buy. They are just trying to push their package.
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post #86 of 109
1/8/06 at 4:27pm
Originally posted by Telomar
Lets hear it for by the looks of it Intel's already well spent marketing dollars

Hear, hear. Woot.

Originally posted by Telomar
All ViiV is is a sticker that you can attach, accompanied by some money for marketing, if your system meets some basic guidelines, which include a lot of Intel parts. A 64 bit processor is not actually one of them as Yonah is a usable solution. You can build a ViiV computer with entirely off the shelf components. Intel is just trying to make people associate their brand name with home theatre PCs.

the idea remains that with ViiV Apple has a lot of "turnkey" (?) components which are fast, cool, and widely available to make its iHome media center thingy, without having to resort to a lot of homebrew r&d itself.... at least in principle at this stage, this is the promise of Intel Viiv for Apple.
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post #87 of 109
1/8/06 at 4:51pm
Quote:
Originally posted by TenoBell
Not every projection television uses LCD. 3LCD is an organization that promotes LCD projection in general versus other display tech (Plasma, DLP, etc).

But I wasn't saying that, I was saying that pretty much every LCD projection system was already "3LCD" long before this group formed.

Quote:
Are you saying because LCD projection already exists there is no way these companies can pool their resources and improve it?

Other than another lame acronym for marketing, what did they really do to improve on previous LCD? What I see on the 3LCD site is that they are desperately trying to counter the DLP branding and marketing. I prefer LCD, but I prefer them not to resort to what looks like an act of desperation.

Quote:
I did not say they had anything to do with CRT. Because they are projection technology they provide some of the benefits of CRT. Creating a whole picture from three pure light sources is an advantage that Plasma and LCD TFT lack.

From the diagrams on the 3LCD web site, those "three pure light sources" are simply using the same prism-from-one-bulb trick that has been done all along. The old technique is not bad, but not new.

IIRC, plasma uses the same kind of phosphors as CRT, so the claim you make comparing color quality against CRT is kind of moot.

Quote:

SXRD is a variation of LCOS. But considering no one else (including Intel) really got LCOS to work, Sony actually shipping a LCOS product is an achievement.

JVC has been fabbing and shipping LCOS for maybe a decade, well before Sony contrived the SXRD trademark. In fairness, JVC did have its own contrived trademark, D-ILA.
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post #88 of 109
1/8/06 at 4:58pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Telomar
Lets hear it for by the looks of it Intel's already well spent marketing dollars

All ViiV is is a sticker that you can attach, accompanied by some money for marketing, if your system meets some basic guidelines, which include a lot of Intel parts. A 64 bit processor is not actually one of them as Yonah is a usable solution. You can build a ViiV computer with entirely off the shelf components. Intel is just trying to make people associate their brand name with home theatre PCs.

Not saying it's a bad idea I'm just saying there's nothing new in the technology that you couldn't already buy. They are just trying to push their package.

As you said, in order to be labeled a Viiv system, it has to meet certain guidelines and have certain parts to be certified. Only certain CPUs and chipsets will do. Here's what they say about their Viiv test utility:
Quote:
Developed by Intel Corporation to allow customers to determine whether or not their digital entertainment systems bearing the Intel¨ Viivª technology logo label have the required components that enable Intel Viiv technology. Intel Viiv technology is a set of PC technologies designed to maximize the enjoyment of digital entertainment in the home. Powered by an Intel¨ dual-core processor, Intel Viiv technology can display media in a home theater experience.

What's new is that Intel put together a specification for a home theater PC. The chips that are specified work with certain chipsets and are made to work with certain Intel drivers. There's some flexibility for OEMs so they can make different systems at different price points but by adhering to the spec, they can be sure the system works properly with a wide range of media formats and codecs. More, here: Digital Home Technologies

One example:
Quote:
The new H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard enables telcos and ISPs to deliver high-quality video and television over digital subscriber lines (DSL), creating new revenue-generating opportunities.
\tDownload free whitepaper
H.264/AVC helps enable telcos to boost their ARPU and retain their competitive position by offering IP video services, such as video-on demand and IPTV, using their existing copper infrastructure and DSL technologies.
H.264/AVC reduces the bandwidth requirements for delivering broadcast- and DVD-quality video streams to well within the limits of a 1.5 Mbps DSL loop. Reduced bandwidth demand means a larger IP video services TAM for telcos, reduced costs compared to MPEG-2-based video service deployment, and higher density of services on their current infrastructure.

Popular and profitable content services can now be bundled on today's DSL services, overcoming earlier bandwidth constraints. The technical solution from Thomson and Intel utilizes powerful compression and decoding in equipment installed at both customer premises and service provider facilities.

I don't have to explain how processor intensive H.264 decoding is, do I? Intel came up with the spec they did so this could be done effortlessly. You can't do that with a bag of junk off the shelf unless they happen to be the right parts.
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post #89 of 109
1/8/06 at 5:22pm
BIG question here: what sort of GPUS are they qualifying at this stage? Answer: NONE, because intel is pushing for video codec processing on CPU not offloaded to GPU, and they want to continue to push their existing products.

interestingly, these are the list of components, not a bag of junk, but nothing suprising though!!! here is the secret of viiv!! hah omfg what a marketing bunch of bollocks to push their EXISTING PRODUCTS. can't believe i got almost tricked by this

* Processors
* Intel® Pentium® D processor
* Intel® Core Duo processor
* Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition

* Chipsets
* Intel® 975X Express Chipset
* Intel® 955X Express Chipset
* Intel® 945G Express Chipset
* Intel® 945P Express Chipset
* Intel® 945GT Express Chipset
* Mobile Intel® 945GM Express Chipset

* LAN
* Intel® PRO/1000 PM Network Connection
* Intel® PRO/100 VE Network Connection
* Intel® PRO/100 VM Network Connection
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post #90 of 109
1/8/06 at 5:51pm
Quote:
Originally posted by sunilraman
it could be reported as "1.225mhz front side bus" (which is great in its own right) but really its running 2.45 megatransports? (is that MT abbreviation that AMD uses?) per second... i wonder how i obtain a figure of what that means in throughput of Gbytes or Gbits per second

Yes, 1.2GHz is 2.4MT/s, which you multiply by 4 to get 8.4GB/s. But the HT speed has almost no effect on the speed of your system.
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post #91 of 109
1/8/06 at 5:55pm
Quote:
Originally posted by wmf
Yes, 1.2GHz is 2.4MT/s, which you multiply by 4 to get 8.4GB/s. But the HT speed has almost no effect on the speed of your system.

it has an effect on my ego though
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post #92 of 109
1/8/06 at 5:59pm
Quote:
Originally posted by TenoBell
As far as Viiv.

Mostly to me sounds like a marketing thing, more than distinctive product.

Intel seems to take elements that already exist combining them together and calling it Viiv.

I don't see this as something big Apple has to jump onto.


well apple is involved as far as using an intel cpu, intel motherboard, and intel wireless/wired networking chipset, in order of likelyhood \

here's the secret: IMHO Paul Otellini is desperately counting on Apple to make the concept and brand of Viiv cool so that Intel can storm the living room over the next two to five years.

he's hoping "viiv inside" will work as well as "intel inside".
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post #93 of 109
1/8/06 at 6:50pm
Quote:
But I wasn't saying that, I was saying that pretty much every LCD projection system was already "3LCD" long before this group formed.

What does that matter? LCD is competing with other display technologies. These companies have invested money into LCD manufactuering, the point of the group is to develop and promote LCD projection. What does it matter that LCD existed before this group?

Quote:
Other than another lame acronym for marketing, what did they really do to improve on previous LCD?

So far thier marketing materials don't give any explicit information on what the group has done to improve LCD. The group feels LCD is already better than competing display technology's.

Sony, Samsung, and LG are investing billions into LCD manufacture. I seriously doubt they feel its perfect and will do no further R&D to improve it.

Quote:
plasma uses the same kind of phosphors as CRT, so the claim you make comparing color quality against CRT is kind of moot.

Phosphorus refers to glowing materials for illuminacne. Pretty much all display technologies use phosphor materials in some way. LCD, LED, OLED also use phospherous elements. LCD uses it for backlighting. LED and OLED use it to help create accurate color.

Phosphors in the future will be used in conjunction with electroluminescent polymers. Which are more energy efficient.
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post #94 of 109
1/8/06 at 7:02pm
Quote:
What's new is that Intel put together a specification for a home theater PC. The chips that are specified work with certain chipsets and are made to work with certain Intel drivers.

This is predicated on the bases that an OEM feels Intels chipeset and drivers are the best or even good enough.

I'm not saying they aren't, but Apple may decide they like something else better.

Quote:
I don't have to explain how processor intensive H.264 decoding is, do I? Intel came up with the spec they did so this could be done effortlessly.

I encode and decode H.264 on my 2 year old PowerBook right now. It can be argued newer chips will do it faster. But software wise its not much effort now.

Quote:
here's the secret: IMHO Paul Otellini is desperately counting on Apple to make the concept and brand of Viiv cool so that Intel can storm the living room over the next two to five years.

If this is the case the burden would then fall to Otellini to bring Apple on board. From what I see so far Viiv doesn't seem like a big deal.
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post #95 of 109
1/8/06 at 7:19pm
Something else I just thought about.

Another reason I perfer the Mac over PC. Is that Apple does not segment its computers the way PC OEM's do.

Home theater, multimedia, business, workstation.

Basically any Mac hardware can run any software designed for Mac. In essence every Mac potentially can be home theater, multimedia, business.

There is little need for a Viiv delineation.
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post #96 of 109
1/8/06 at 8:51pm
Quote:
Originally posted by TenoBell
What does that matter? LCD is competing with other display technologies. These companies have invested money into LCD manufactuering, the point of the group is to develop and promote LCD projection. What does it matter that LCD existed before this group?

It matters to me because I don't want to get suckered by marketing, the same goes with VIIV.

For 3LCD It's the same thing as they've been doing all along, with the requisite improvements every year without silly marketing. It it looks like they are creating the perception that somehow suddenly some new and and significantly better idea than what has been promoted before.

Quote:
Phosphorus refers to glowing materials for illuminacne. Pretty much all display technologies use phosphor materials in some way. LCD, LED, OLED also use phospherous elements. LCD uses it for backlighting. LED and OLED use it to help create accurate color.[/B]

Phosphorus is a fairly specific type of material. I don't think LED uses phosphorus, I can't find anything that suggests this. Apparently there is one type of OLED that does use phosphorus, several types do not. The difference I was suggesting with plasma is that it uses phosphors in exactly the same manner as CRTs, so I'm still puzzled how you claim that the color quality of projection LCD is somewhere between plasma and CRT.

Projection LCD generally does not use phosphors to make their lighting, though most flat panel LCDs do, for now.
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post #97 of 109
1/9/06 at 2:32am
Whoa!

So now with Viive, Apple has, like, no choice but to go with at least 5.1 surround sound. I'll bet Jobs threw a shit fit when he discovered that Intel had cornered Apple into offering modern features with their computers.
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post #98 of 109
1/9/06 at 5:43am
Quote:
Originally posted by sunilraman
.....

* Processors
* Intel® Pentium® D processor
* Intel® Core Duo processor
* Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition

* Chipsets
* Intel® 975X Express Chipset
* Intel® 955X Express Chipset
* Intel® 945G Express Chipset
* Intel® 945P Express Chipset
* Intel® 945GT Express Chipset
* Mobile Intel® 945GM Express Chipset

* LAN
* Intel® PRO/1000 PM Network Connection
* Intel® PRO/100 VE Network Connection
* Intel® PRO/100 VM Network Connection


also might i point out if VIIV is so great, why does it "feature" the craptastic pentium 4/D/extreme cpu ???
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post #99 of 109
1/9/06 at 9:17am
Quote:
Originally posted by sunilraman
also might i point out if VIIV is so great, why does it "feature" the craptastic pentium 4/D/extreme cpu ???

They are actually pretty good at media handling, specifically encoding and decoding. Which happens to be the point of the VIIV branding.
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post #100 of 109
1/9/06 at 9:50am
Quote:
Originally posted by wmf
That Ars article is a little exaggerated. Conroe will have a 8.5-10.6 GB/s FSB. At that time, Athlons will have 10.6-12.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The difference isn't that large.

HDTVs are already expensive; I can't imagine cramming a $1,000 computer into one.

A large part of the price of a computer is for chassis, power supply, I/O circuitry and connections, and case.

If you integrate that into another product, the price comes way down.

The Mini is a circuit board and HD. The rest is support. The mobo, with cpu etc., likely costs $200. The drive costs Apple maybe $40-60, depending on which one they use.

If you take the computer from the iMac G5, it likey costs Apple $500.

I can see a computer module that could slip into the Tv monitor, the way the computer board, with memory and HD, slips into my Hp CLS 8500N printer.
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post #101 of 109
1/9/06 at 10:01am
Quote:
Originally posted by Chucker
You mean Merom.

Actually, Merom is a portable chip design. While we've been hearing rumors that the next iMac will be using it, and it might, Conroe is the desktop version.

It will have better performance as it isn't limited by the same power constraints that Merom will be.

It's possible that the iMac will have one dual core Conroe, and the PM's will have two of them.

It's way ahead of schedule (how refreshing!), just as Merom is.

But all of the new chips; Yonah, Merom, and Conroe are coming out at lower bins than was at first expected. For the Yonah, that was 2.5 GHz, rather than the 2.16 that we will be seeing.
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post #102 of 109
1/9/06 at 4:43pm
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
It's possible that the iMac will have one dual core Conroe, and the PM's will have two of them.

I doubt it as Conroe has no MP support. This is what I find interesting for future Apple products. I expect they'll do what they've done now. Some have Conroe, some end up with the equivalent Xeon.
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post #103 of 109
1/9/06 at 4:52pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Telomar
I doubt it as Conroe has no MP support. This is what I find interesting for future Apple products. I expect they'll do what they've done now. Some have Conroe, some end up with the equivalent Xeon.

Where did you see that Conroe has no MP support? A dual core unit implies MP from the start. As Apple is expected to use Conroe in the PM, I would expect MP support is present.
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post #104 of 109
1/9/06 at 5:51pm
To be precise, Conroe only supports single-socket systems. Woodcrest will support multi-socket systems. The chips are otherwise identical. So I expect to see low end Power Macs with Conroe and high end Power Macs with Woodcrest. (A depopulated two-socket Woodcrest system will be much more expensive than a single-socket Conroe system, so I expect that Apple will have two Power Mac motherboards instead of one like they have today.)
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post #105 of 109
1/9/06 at 7:40pm
Quote:
Originally posted by JeffDM
They are actually pretty good at media handling, specifically encoding and decoding. Which happens to be the point of the VIIV branding.

fair enough. i was just trying to highlight that Viiv is mostly branding/marketing to push intel's dualcore offerings and the motherboard chipsets around that. i personally saw a pentium D play a HD video on one monitor and SD video on a tv all at the same time with a windows media center-type PC (priced at around equivalent of $1200 USD IIRC) (edit: the point of this paragraph is that okay, i think we cannot accuse intel of false advertising)

i'm all for the Yonah, i think it's awesome, just that if i could i'd advise as many people as possible to avoid the pentium4/D/EE.

i really don't know wtf AMD's marketing dept is doing though, against the pentium4/D/EE AMD x2s on a cost- and performance-per-watt basis, AMD does come out on top almost all the time. an AMD dualcore, "even" the 3800, would be a beautiful start for home theatre pc (it goes downhill once windows gets involved**)

**can't really comment though i am curious but have not really researched much on windows media center edition and capture cards and all that jazz. my gut tells me it ain't as easy as it is supposed to be... then again, this is a mac forum, so hmmm
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post #106 of 109
1/9/06 at 9:02pm
Quote:
Originally posted by wmf
To be precise, Conroe only supports single-socket systems. Woodcrest will support multi-socket systems. The chips are otherwise identical. So I expect to see low end Power Macs with Conroe and high end Power Macs with Woodcrest. (A depopulated two-socket Woodcrest system will be much more expensive than a single-socket Conroe system, so I expect that Apple will have two Power Mac motherboards instead of one like they have today.)

That seems to be the difference. But Woodcreast will also support larger caches.
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post #107 of 109
1/9/06 at 9:11pm
Whoops!

Didn't see that.

The "database" of Insider seems to screw up a lot. First Safari can't find the site, then when you post a second time, they magically both appear.
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post #108 of 109
1/9/06 at 9:40pm
whoa. deja vu. a glitch in the matrix 8)
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post #109 of 109
1/9/06 at 10:01pm
Quote:
Originally posted by sunilraman
whoa. deja vu. a glitch in the matrix 8)

I hope the 9th Doctor wasn't in there at the time.

He still has to make an appearance on our shores.
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