One of the most talked about announcements made at this
year’s CES so far was AMD’s plans to directly compete with Intel on the home
media and entertainment front. Recently, AMD has been doing well in the CPU wars, with support
from movie studios using AMD technology to produce films such as Star Wars and Sin City.
Yesterday, NVIDIA announced that it will partner with AMD to
push the LIVE! initiative. NVIDIA already has been focusing on the home entertainment market
for more than two years and the experience they posses would surely be helpful
to the alliance. With nForce products widely used for home media computers, AMD
technically has an edge over Intel in terms of installed base. From the PR,
NVIDIA stated:
NVIDIA expects that
the NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) FX, NVIDIA GeForce 6-Series and NVIDIA GeForce
7-Series desktop and notebook graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as the
Company's NVIDIA nForce(R)4 core-logic solutions, will be complementary with
AMD LIVE! This includes hardware and software for both 32-bit and 64-bit
computing environments.
VIA today announced its support for AMD as well, stating
that its latest K8T900 and K8M890 are AMD LIVE! ready. We can expect that VIA
will be producing more integrated solutions to reflect AMD’s direction. AMD LIVE!
brings together more component integration and we will likely see more features
being integrated into single and two chip solutions from both NVIDIA and VIA.
With upcoming chipsets, VIA says it is also integrating support for the latest
1080P HD resolutions.
AMD LIVE! is an exciting proposition for the market
that leverages AMD's ongoing commitment to the professional digital media
community and extends it to experiences in the home," commented Chewei
Lin, Vice President of Product Marketing of VIA. "VIA has long been
focused through our graphics and chipset solutions on enhancing multimedia
performance, and together with AMD LIVE! we aim to deliver a jaw-dropping home
entertainment experience!
Many
companies are beginning to shift their traditional focus to jump into
the home entertainment market and develop products with more
integration. AMD's LIVE! is a technical standard of components that
other manufacturers can follow. For example, media systems that are AMD
LIVE! "certified" will come standard with certain options that may not
be available on other systems -- similar to how all Intel Centrino
systems must be equipped with 802.11b wi-fi as a minimum. These types
of platform focuses strives to bring a higher standard of computing and
media experience to the consumer all while driving prices down. Now
with Intel facing direct competition from AMD, consumers can expect
exciting solutions from all sides.
