Sandy Bridge Owners Can Rent CinemaNow HD Movies
Intel is once again trying to leverage Hollywood fame to promote its processors.
The company said that owners of PCs with Sandy Bridge processors can now buy or rent movies from CinemaNow in 1080p resolution via its "Intel Insider" program. Previously, CinemaNow only offered standard definition movies, Intel said. Intel also offers movies from the Warner Bros., however, that content is not limited to Intel-based PCs only.
Intel has some history using movie content as a promotional tool for its chips. Some readers may remember Viiv, a brand and software that Intel used back in 2006 to market certain Intel PCs as home entertainment systems. Back then, Intel invested into a Clickstar, a venture co-founded with Academy award-winning actor Morgan Freeman. Clickstar was supposed to produce movies that were solely distributed over the Internet and made available on Intel Viiv PCs. Clickstar became the first company to actually offer a movie for download, 10 Items or less, in 2006, but was eventually shut down in 2008.
Intel has become much more careful since then and the investment into the exclusive partnership with CinemaNow (trademark owned by BestBuy) is probably not quite as expensive as ClickStar.
Well, it certainly isn't drawing as much attention as BD is (AMD hasn't had a major arch change since 1995 I believe with the K8 arch). I see this is more of a perk Intel is offering for SB owners to probably draw in more buyers, especially for those looking for an HTPC center (not really something a gamer would need, but it's still nice). It probably won't give a sales boost for the i5s and i7s, more likely the i3s.
Really though, Intel hasn't either. The entire Core arch was based off the old Pentium III after Netburst (pentium 4) was hopelessly unable to scale.
you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about do you?
So much has changed since then that its hard to tell what remnants are left over.
Besides, with AMD's "radical" new module based approach, they seem to be going nowhere. What do you prefer?
There's really no telling the overall performance as the engineering samples don't have the final silicon. Until release, we won't no how well BD performs.
Are you using discrete graphics or integrated? I'm assuming this is only possible through HD Graphics 3000/2000 and its PAVP.
Then of course, they continually bloat the x86 standard by adding new instructions, which they may or may not let AMD and VIA use. Many apps still choose to be compiled for i386, i686, or basic x86_64, except for the benchmarks you see on sites like Tom's which are almost all compiled with ICC, with optimizations for Intel's latest(but not AMD's).
Does anyone who own a K model really use the integrated crap?
Intel's core base processors where based on the Pentium M platform. Intel had heat issues with the Pentium IV that could not be resolved.