AMD is expected to unveil a new platform under the "Live" brand at the Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place this week in Las Vegas. The "Live" devices are expected to directly compete with Intel's Viiv.
The AMD Live devices will be likely PCs or notebooks. The company is expected to
follow Intel's Viiv strategy by putting its new brand on PCs carrying the
technology, which will be built with home entertainment in mind.
The AMD Live PCs will be recognizable by a printed sticker on their chassis
and will come with various features such as multi-channel sound. However, it is not clear whether AMD will follow Intel's policy that requires PC makers to use an
Intel processor, chipset and Intel's networking components in order to get the
Viiv sticker on their devices.
Intel announced Viiv back in August 2005 with the intention to help drive and
promote the convergence between home computers and home entertainment and media
systems. Intel has managed to get the support of several makers of PC and set-top
boxes, and will also offer download services and interoperability with music
players. AMD's Live would currently need to generate a great deal of support to be
successful.
Canadian ATI today announced its support for the AMD Live! products, and said that a wide range of products and technologies to support upcoming AMD LIVE! solutions: digital and analog TV tuner cards, graphics cards, Radeon X1000 series graphics cards and All-In-Wonder and TV Wonder multimedia add-in cards.
NVIDIA also expects that its GeForce FX, GeForce 6-Series and GeForce 7-Series desktop and notebook graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as the Company's NVIDIA nForce 4 core-logic solutions, will be complementary with AMD LIVE! This includes hardware and software for both 32-bit and 64-bit computing environments and technologies such as NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU capability and NVIDIA Pure Video.
Live PCs are scheduled to come out around the middle of the year. Viiv PCs will
arrive in the first quarter.
In addition, AMD showcased a variety of AMD embedded processor-based personal
media players (PMPs) that offer DVD-quality video, and promises hours of video
playback time on a single battery charge. PMPs are a new category of small,
portable electronics that may likely follow the path of MP3 players.
PMP designers have elected AMD's Alchemy family of processors to power their
products.
The AMD Alchemy processors features integrated media acceleration hardware and
accompanying media player software, which allows consumers to download a wide
range of digital media content from DVRs, PCs or the Internet directly to their
PMPs, without the need for file conversions or transcoding.