The desktop publishing revolution gave home and low-end business users access to the same graphical power that big-bucks production houses had. On Monday, Intel promised a comparable mass-market revolution - this time in 3-D rendering and imaging.
At an "Intel Platform Day," held in San Jose, California, developers and technology partners met to discuss the company's Visible Computing Initiative, which Intel's W. Eric Mentzer described as "a combination of chip sets, peripherals, and open specifications that will fuel the flow of technology from high-end workstations to PCs." Mentzer is director of marketing for Intel's platform components division.
For its part, Intel brought its Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) to the party. The AGP will enhance the power of Intel's new multimedia-enabling MMX processor with high-bandwidth memory access to deliver quick and sizzling graphics. An open AGP spec can be licensed to develop authoring tools and products which take advantage of this souped-up Intel hardware.
More than 60 companies were on hand to show enthusiasm for the initiative, including Microsoft, Real 3D, Hewlett-Packard, Adobe Systems, and Macromedia. Demonstrations featured mostly power-hungry applications, but the initiative may drive introductions of consumer applications by year's end.
Chief among those will probably be digital photo processing and image manipulation from Eastman Kodak. Kodak chairman and CEO George M. C. Fisher said via telepresence that his company was getting out of the film business and into the imaging business. Kodak and Intel will work together on standard specs for editing, storing, sharing, and publishing images from digital cameras.
Intel seems to be turning up the heat on competing platforms, including Macintosh and Silicon Graphics workstations. Although Mac is still considered platform of choice for multimedia development, Macromedia's key Director authoring tool has been available for PCs since version 4.0, and the company worked with Intel on the AGP's features set.
"I hesitate to say we've taken people away from the Mac," said Rix Kramlich, senior product manager for 3-D products at Macromedia. "[But] I'd say we've allowed more people to do multimedia and Web authoring than would have done it before." Mac and Wintel versions of Director 6.0 will ship concurrently in April.
Leading workstation manufacturer Silicon Graphics isn't breaking a sweat, although its O2 competes at similar price points to loaded Pentium machines. In fact, John Schimpf, an SGI marketing manager, was on hand Monday to announce eight new licenses of its Open GL, a 3-D graphics applications programming interface.
"What the Wintel platform represents is an incremental opportunity to bring visual computing to a larger marketplace," said Patrick Tickle, manager of desktop marketing at SGI." More people will get their hands on this technology as a result of Intel helping to drive this market. We've been there for 15 years, so we see this as a good thing."
Bill Miller, director of strategic communications for Intel, insists that his company's announcement is not a power play against competing platforms.
"The computer industry as a whole is delivering a new level of users and uses to the (PC) platform," Miller said. "Within that pie, we'd like a healthy slice of that pie."
