Intel targets home entertainment trillions

Intel has been detailing plans to target its business technology at the home market for consumer electronics.

Don MacDonald, general manager of Intel's digital home group, said at the firm's Developer Forum in San Francisco that the digital home technology market would be worth $11bn by 2008.

Music downloading would be worth $1.5bn, he added, and online gaming a staggering $5.2bn. MacDonald also claimed that by 2007 more music would be bought online legally than pirated.

"The best estimates we have is that there are 1.6 billion homes on the planet, and we aim to leave no home behind," he said.

"The consumer electronics industry has doubled in the past four years. This is not just down to new devices, but old devices which have been reignited by the digital revolution. It's a $3.7 trillion opportunity."

Key to this strategy is bringing the new dual-core Pentium D, formerly known as Smithfield, to market in a variety of devices.

Dell has already built a system around the new chips and 22 manufacturers, including Sony, Acer and Lenovo, are developing systems around the technology.

MacDonald also demonstrated a dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition system with hyper-threading that allowed one user to watch high-definition television while another user on the same PC played a computer game.

On the security side the system uses virtualisation to run multiple partitioned operating systems. This allows users to keep internet access separate from valuable data, and multiple family members to have separate areas of the PC.