Intel Developer Forum, Spring 2004

Louis Burns
Vice President, General Manager, Desktop Platforms Group
Intel Corporation
San Francisco, Calif.
February 17, 2004

LOUIS BURNS: What if? It's a very profound statement in many, many ways. And what Intel's been about for a long time is combining what works with that "what if" -- sparking that imagination and then making that "what if" come true.

We have a 35-year history of doing that. In our entire 35-year history, we've also done that collaborating closely with you, our industry, or in this case, multiple industries, devoted to taking "what if" and making it real.

Good afternoon. My name is Louis Burns. I'm here for the rest of the afternoon to talk about the next opportunity to collaborate in the digital home space.

We're at one of the most exciting points in our 35-year history at Intel, fueled by everything going digital. Not just an evolution within multiple industries, something much more fundamental. It's really about the creation of a new industry, a new industry focused on the growth opportunities in the digital home.

So fundamental is this change, so fundamental, that companies that exist today won't exist in five years. So fundamental is the change that companies you've never heard of before could be the leaders in that new industry.

Last year, I talked about our vision. And that vision is actually very straightforward. It's simply giving users what they want, any content on any device, anywhere in their home. Simple to say, difficult to do, but exactly what they're asking us for.

We really crystallized our thinking on this in the last few months. You saw on the video that we do a lot of research, having our people live with families around the world to understand not only how they use technology, but also how they might use technology that doesn't exist yet.

So as we thought through this, we really crystallized our thinking. Let's take an example. What if you could see a first-run movie at home the same night it's released in the theater for the first time?

(Video plays and ends.)

LOUIS BURNS: Well, you know, the digital home is much more than just about entertainment, which is, frankly, what most of us have thought about in that context; and, frankly, what's been written has been mostly in that space.

But what if you could use the same technology, the digital home technology, to help your kids in school?

(Video plays and ends.)

LOUIS BURNS: So, as you can see, it's really much more than just entertainment. It's a great example of how you might help a kid someplace in the world take advantage of the technology and help them in school.

Let's go to one last place, though. So what if you could take the same technology and you could help stay connected with people halfway around the world?

(Video plays and ends.)

LOUIS BURNS: I love that last one. I'm trying to think of how many of you in the crowd actually were able to take a picture with your phone or your PDA when you were in college and send the picture to your mom and dad and try to get food sent that was more appropriate. How many of you?

(Laughter.)

LOUIS BURNS: Kids get everything nowadays. It's such a wonderful move forward. These are really simple examples, but I think powerful examples, of how people can take advantage of what we've been working on as an industry and will deliver in the digital home.

You know, with the digital home, I think the last statement the young man made was very powerful. It's not contained within the four walls of a dwelling that's kind of where you're at. And that's a very profound thought as we deliver this capability into the marketplace.

So how do we, as innovators, as an industry, make this vision real? How do we bring these usages to consumers? Because consumers want them. Our research and studies show they want this capability. We need to provide products that really deliver on these experiences. And we have to deliver on three very, very simple but very important criteria.

The first one: it has to be dirt simple. I literally means the ability to take it out of the box, whatever that device is, plug it in the wall, it self-configures and self-identifies to the network.

Consumers don't want to become IT experts. And this opportunity is huge assuming we can deliver on this. They don't want millions of cables and multiple remotes and complex interfaces. They'll judge the success not by telling friends how technically smart they are, but showing them what they can do with this capability. It literally just has to work out of the box. Easy to set up, instant on/off, easy to operate and access.

In other words, we have to simplify that experience. If we have to roll a truck to deliver on this to someone's home, we've failed as an industry.

The second one is: it has to be connected. They want all this stuff to connect and work with each other in a very seamless, easy-to-work-with fashion. Communicate seamlessly with each other. Content literally anywhere on any device in the home.

You saw in the first one the ability to pause the movie in the family room and restart playing it where you left off in the bedroom. They want that ability because that's how they want to engage with the technology, literally. No thinking involved on their part. They want to engage the technology with no cables involved. That's wireless connectivity or Wi-Fi.

And, third, probably the most important part, is they want high-quality content. They want high-quality audio; they want high-quality video. They want that premium capability, that premium content, in their homes and on their terms to move around.

We call this high-fi. And if you think about delivering these three criteria together in a single, seamless user experience, in other words, delivering unified platforms, consumers not only value this, but they'll part with their hard-earned dollars to pay for this.

This starts with technology building blocks, the technology building blocks we provide as an industry. And this is about a unified platform.

So let me show you some of the technologies we're bringing into 2004 to start delivering on this at the most fundamental building block level.

The first is our newest processor, announced in February. It's the first 90-nanometer processor from the Pentium® 4 processor category delivered by us. Outstanding innovations and many firsts in two areas. It's the first high-volume production processor at 90-nanometer, built on 300-millimeter wafers. Tremendous cost advantages in this processor. It incorporates strained silicon technology, high-speed copper interconnects, and located dielectric materials. Many firsts.

It has an innovative feature set. It was designed with the digital home in mind. Understanding from that research what people are going to do with these products feeds into our architects, like you saw Debbie on the video, to deliver that capability. Enhancements to the Intel NetBurst® microarchitecture, significant improvements to Hyper-Threading Technology -- are critical to delivering on this usage model. Faster front-side bus and a large L2 cache at one megabyte. Outstanding performance that delivers on outstanding video, audio, and imaging capability.

Working closely with the processor is our next-generation chipset. And this is not just the next generation, a simple step forward, this is the largest fundamental step forward in a chipset platform and platform capabilities in the last decade.

These platforms move the platform so far forward compared to the previous generations, it's going to change some fundamental things.

First, in graphics. The first product to deliver on PCI Express* graphics to the marketplace, working closely with our colleagues at NVIDIA and ATI, we're able to bring a quantum leap forward in graphics performance for the PC enthusiast in all of us for high-end gaming or multimedia.

In the integrated graphics area, again, a huge leap forward. In fact, this integrated graphics will outrun any of the game boxes in the market segment today. Integrated DX-9 capability.

In the area of memory, when you size the type of applications and how people are going to work in this type of environment, you need high bandwidth. Last year, we introduced the concept of Springdale, of dual-channel DDR memory in a four-layer memory board. This year, we're moving the ball forward significantly with dual-channel DDR2 at the speeds you can see here, again, in a four-layer motherboard, fueling the processor with the memory bandwidth required to deliver on these applications.

Integrated access points. Why would we worry about that? Our fundamental belief is, all clients, desktop or mobile, in the home, in consumers' hands, will have a built-in soft access point. Wireless is so fundamental to this usage model, we put it in the chipset. So soft access point.

High-definition audio. I have a really fun demo I'm going to show you a little bit later that because of the integration of 7.1 Dolby sound in the chipset, really delivers the home theater experience in every PC shipped.

And last, but not least, the area of RAID or soft RAID. Why it is such a technology that matters not only in corporate IT shops, but also matters at home.

How many people here have ever lost a digital picture or video on your PC at home? How many people here back up your system every day at home?

(Laughter.)

LOUIS BURNS: We have a very honest crowd today. This is another example of features and capabilities required to deliver on this capability, the digital home usage model.

Last, I'd like to talk about LCOS. LCOS was a big splash at the Consumer Electronics Show when we introduced it, and we have to think of this in the simplest fashion. We're doing what we do best. We're taking to this environment what Intel does best: innovate and integrate. Take advantage of Moore's Law, take advantage of faster transistors, take advantage of smaller geometries and apply it in this space.

LCOS is so fundamental of a change it will bring to those who aspire to, but can't afford, high definition, big-screen experiences. It will do this in the sub-$2,000 category for a 60-inch-plus TV.

What's really cool about this, as we move the process generations forward, we can generate more and more capability into the base-level silicon on top of which the liquid crystal sits. So think of very intelligent devices going into very cost effective TVs, and fundamentally changing the economics of the current TV industry.

Not an evolutionary change, but a revolutionary change.

But great technologies in isolation really don't deliver on what consumers want.

Consumers want a unified platform solution. If your house is like mine, you probably have a stack of CE devices, separate purchases, cables, components. Some people actually measure their prowess with their neighbors by the number of remote controls they have lined up on the table.

How many people have more than five remote controls on the coffee table? Come on, be honest, all you guys.

(Laughter.)

LOUIS BURNS: And you think that's pretty cool, right? We have two hands in the front row here. You have 10 remotes? Whoa, 17? We have therapy for you after the show.

(Laughter.)

LOUIS BURNS: So we started looking through this. Lots of cables, lots of purchases. Some really interesting things, and we said, you know, what if we could replace that whole stack of devices, literally replace that whole stack of devices, with one simple platform that incorporates all those features of all these discrete devices. In fact, I'm sorry to say, it only has one remote, but you can leave the other ones out. It's okay. It only has one remote.

So let me show what you this platform has to offer. This is kind of how the Entertainment PC was born. What you see here is that stack of devices. What you can't see on the back is the rat's nest of cables. What we're talking about is really cool technologies based on Prescott, Grantsdale and others. We put this together working with one of our innovation platform companies, alliance members, with FIC -- and we've developed the Kessler Platform.

What the Kessler platform does is literally, through the use of the technologies and through the use of a single remote, replace this entire stack -- which is a PVR, a game box, all those other things.

A pretty profound movement, and really a great step forward in giving consumers what they want. Remember, if we want to grow this market segment, we really need to give consumers what they want, and they don't want to become IT experts to operate it.

So let me show you what this platform has to offer, and we'll do some demonstrations of it right now. This platform is based on Prescott and Grantsdale. It's running the newest version of Microsoft's Media Center edition. It's a new category. When we say "Entertainment PC," what we mean is a PC that's mostly focused on consumption. We say 90 percent plus of the time people will engage this PC with a remote control. Not a keyboard, not a mouse. It's really a consumption-based device.

Let's start with the audio aspect of this. I think about this as my audio center. It has Intel high-definition audio which enables that multi-channel sound or audio.

Intel and Dolby are working together on this effort to try to extend these capabilities and the sound quality into this Entertainment PC.

So what I'd like to do now is introduce Steve Vernon from Dolby laboratories to talk about the work together that Intel and Dolby have been doing to move this platform forward. Hi, Steve, thanks for coming today.

(Demo begins and ends.)

LOUIS BURNS: Pretty cool sound, isn't it? Really cool sound. As I would say, wicked cool sound, in fact.

What you'll see, by the way, from the camera, this is a Nikon D2. It's actually got an 802.11 capability connected to the bottom of the camera. You see he took a picture of Steve and me, and wirelessly it showed up on our PC.

What's neat about the camera is if you put on the field antenna, you can get about 500 feet from your house and take pictures, or use it at a soccer game or whatever.

What it also demonstrated is this has the soft access point built into the platform. So you don't need another access point. We seamlessly and wirelessly connected that back up.

So that showed outstanding audio capability. We coupled that with the soft access point. So let's take a look at what we can do from a video point of view.

Let's go up here to my videos, and we have the same LCOS TV that Craig Barrett had this morning. But this is going to give you high-definition video, and let's run over here to this one and take a look at what you can kick out of this box.

(Trailer plays and ends.)

LOUIS BURNS: What you can see there is awesome capability. It's WMV capability, and why does that matter in this case? It takes a very fast, capable processor to actually be able to do that work. That's why Prescott or 90-nanometer Pentium 4 processor makes total sense in this space.

So Entertainment PC presents a great opportunity because it's a new category. It's PCs that don't exist in today's marketplace, but are greatly needed from the consumer's point of view. It presents a wonderful opportunity for us moving forward.

As an example, we've talked to a number of researchers, including John Petty's research group, and this is a new category, not a replacement of an existing category. By 2006 they see this category in the tens of millions of units on an annual basis, which is pretty significant growth in the creation of a new category, as well as reaping benefits from a financial point of view.

We'll continue to develop this, and what you saw earlier today is the Sandow platform, and I believe most of you received pictures of this earlier.

So what we talked about earlier, the digital home goes beyond the four walls of the house, and what I mean by that is, wouldn't it be nice if you could do what we call outside in. So what I have here from a demonstration point of view, is the next-generation Intel® Centrino™ Mobile Technology based on Dothan, and this has the ability to tunnel back into the home network. Let's say we're at Starbucks or we're at an airport and we want to get access to our personal content or get back onto our PC in the house, be it an EPC or a different PC in your house. You want access to that.

So what I have here in the demonstration is we'll be able to tunnel -- and actually the same video I played over on there on the LCOS we can actually play over here. The sound won't come up at this stage but I can hear it up here close. This is the exact same video actually being sourced out of one of the PCs in the home, and I can be sitting at a hotspot in Starbucks or in an airport in L.A. or Frankfurt or wherever and be able to deliver on that ability to tunnel back in. It could be videos, pictures, a number of things.

So this is a great idea. There are a number of great things about it. We talked earlier, it really has to deliver on what we call premium movie content. Doing your own personal pictures or videos is cool, but we need premium movie content.

So with that in mind, we've been working very closely with Movielink. Movielink is one of the first movers, the fast movers on delivering premium movie content through the IP network.

We've been working closely with them for a number of months now and we've had some pretty successful work so far. For example, 99 cent winter movie specials, which they just completed, essentially lets you download first-run, really cool new movies at 99 cents a copy. I don't know how many people here took advantage of it but the response was stunning, which tells us, one, there's a desire out there.

We're also working closely with them to make sure that their interface, which works wonderfully today on a two-foot interface, with a keyboard and a mouse leading into the PC, works just as well in a CE -- or an Entertainment PC , because that interface is a little different.

The other thing that I think is really intriguing is that a lot of kids today have viewed music as free. Let's leave it at that. And, in fact, if you've been to college campuses around the world, you've seen that.

What we've been working on with them is a college site which would allow students to get access to premium content at a very, very good price, but, most importantly, in a very legal manner, so that the content owners, the studios, and the artists, will get paid for their intellectual property. But the students will get access to that.

We're really excited about what's going on with Movielink, because we think it's one of the fast movers in the industry of where this is going.

The power of the Entertainment PC is awesome. It's a consumption device. It's a device that you lean back and consume the information from. I've shown you the audio space, we can deliver the very best audio capability out of the PC based on Grantsdale. We've talked about the ability of an integrated access point to have all of the network show up here. And then premium content. We're making tremendous strides forward, for example with Movielink and also the studios.

Let's spend some time and talk about creation a bit.

Now, if you think about an Entertainment PC as a consumption device, you still will have probably another device in your home, which is where you do the creation or the management of that capability. I spend a lot of time with digital photography. I actually have a library of over 4,000 pictures in a digital library. I'm probably not going to manage those with a remote. I spend that time in creation and working on those in a digital darkroom on my PC in my den.

So what we have here is a Prescott-based platform. And it's running a Pinnacle Studios application. And inside this is a PCI Express* graphics board from ATI. What I'll do here is actually start this up. And you'll see some pretty cool graphics, some eye candy here, which is actually pretty cool, taking advantage of the bandwidth, taking advantage of the throughput in the PCI Express graphics thing.

Now, we talked earlier about how many people have lost data on their PCs. I talked about RAID or soft RAID capability.

So with this application continuing to run, let's say that one of these drives goes bad. And so we just kind of take the drive out. And you'll notice the application continues to run, at least I hope it does. Yep, so far it does. This drive is a simple drive you can pick up at Fry's or any other place.

What you'll see here up on the screen, says that the RAID volume has degraded. So this application continues to run. My drive went bad. This will do an exact mirror of the other drive. By the way, I could have had the top drive and had the same effect. So now I have an extra drive sitting around the house or I actually go buy a new one without having to explain to my wife that I lost all of those pictures of grandpa and grandma and the kids. I shove this in. What you'll see here in about four to five seconds, it'll actually come up and start talking about the fact that it's rebuilding that volume and actually starting to re-mirror all that information. There we go. A RAID volume is being rebuilt. Data redundancy is being restored.

This is the type of feature that consumers want. Now, we don't want to explain to them that it's a RAID 0/1 and all these technologies. What they simply want is an ability to protect their digital memories. They simply want the ability, if something goes bad in the system, to pull one of those drives out, plug a new one in, and be back up and running.

Now, pretty interesting to do technically. Pretty sophisticated in many ways. It's an integral part of our chipset and the driver. But it's fundamentally important for the consumers.

Cool technology solving real problems.

So in order to keep this momentum growing, Intel announced the formation of the Digital Home Fund. The Digital Home Fund is investing $200 million in companies that are accelerating the innovation and new technology to deliver on these user experiences we know and you know are real, that consumers want.

It's focused on accelerating the convergence of the PC and the CE industry. It's focused on hardware, software, and middleware. It's about accelerating to deliver, as an industry or group of industries, what consumers have been looking for.

Since we have announced this fund, the response has been mind-blowing -- people around the world, small companies, startups, people with fantastic ideas coming forward to share them with us, all focused on the same thing: Delivering to consumers what they've been looking for.

We've also made really good progress on the area of interoperability.

Last June, we announced the Digital Home Working Group. Seventeen companies from multiple industries on stage together agreed to develop a set of interoperability capabilities that deliver on what consumers have been asking for. They simply want this to work in a seamless fashion. Those 17 companies have grown to over 100. And we're getting signups on a daily basis. It's not too late to join if you're one of the few people who has not. Please contact us and get involved in this Digital Home Working Group.

It's about delivering, again, what consumers have been asking for.

Guidelines are on track for Q2, and probably, most importantly, what we know right now about the marketplace is that products based on these guidelines will be available in Q4 of this year. Tremendous progress from multiple industries delivering on what consumers want.

Intel's also been enabling activities that augment the Digital Home Working Group efforts for device and content-enabling.

We announced last year network media products requirement document or better known as NMPR (Networked Media Product Requirements) in the fall. I'm pleased to announce that the availability of the first software solutions have passed NMPR validation. In fact, if you go out into the Digital Home lounge, you'll see a bookcase full of products that have already been NMPR qualified through the NMPR validation process.

Again, focused on moving the ball forward.

We've released the final test tools. We encourage you to get those tools and ensure you're delivering NMPR-validated products this year.

Now that devices are connected, we need to ensure a seamless interface. What I have to say here is that Web services is coming home. Web services is the capability that's been talked about in the enterprise. Web services is the capability that's been talking about supply chain. Web services has direct applicability to what we're doing in the Digital Home. We're working closely with Microsoft, Canon, and BEA to ensure a seamless Web services capability in the home.

It's important for many reasons, probably one of the most important reasons is not only delivering new usages, but enabling those new business models as companies around the world start selling products with broadband capability. Tremendous progress here. You'll hear a lot more about this throughout the year, and products will be available in 2005.

So, we've made really, really great progress in a number of areas. And, quite frankly, the momentum has been growing at a much faster pace than I could have hoped for over the last six months. It's growing on a number of fronts. But I want to go back to that early question we started with: what if? You know, "what if" is about taking what works and adding that spark of imagination to it.

What if we could deliver on the promise and commitment of seamless interoperability to devices? What if we could make that happen?

What if we could get the content industry to deliver their most prized possession, the crown jewels of what they are about, and deliver that over the IP network?

What if we could collaborate together as an industry, literally collaborate together and deliver on innovative platform solutions that customers or consumers not only like, but they'll part with their hard-earned dollars, they'll spend money to get it because it solves problems and gives them capability?

What if we, as an industry, could actually redefine and define our products with the end users in mind? And what if we could all harness this huge, enormous growth potential of the digital home?

It's a really big, important question. But "what if" is what we're about. At Intel, we're committing to working with you as an industry, as multiple industries, all represented today in this room, to making "what if" real.

We can do this together in a unified ecosystem, because that's what it will take to deliver on the promise, the potential, and the growth of the digital home in what I will argue is not three industries, but the creation of a new industry.

Michael Porter had a very interesting quote that you saw earlier today, "Periods of transformation give companies unusual latitude to influence industry structure." That's a pretty sophisticated concept from a very sophisticated guy. I actually have a much simpler version. You may have seen my version in the Wall Street Journal this year.

Mine simply says, "Companies that take the opportunity and go first in transitions will lead and come out winners. And those who choose to ignore it will go by the way of the dinosaurs."

Thank you for your time today.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.