Intel (News - Alert) outlined its product roadmap at a developer conference on Tuesday disclosing that it will ship the world’s first quad-core processors for PCs servers in November and partnering with DirecTV (News - Alert) to bring satellite TV into the PC realm.

 

Speaking at Fall Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, President and CEO Paul Otellini said in his prepared remarks that advances in silicon technology will deliver breakthrough performance gains that can best be characterized as “the most profound shift in decades.”

 

“The solution begins with the transistor and extends to the chip and platform levels,” Otellini said, explaining that a single YouTube video stream today can potentially hobble a PC of yesteryear.

 

At the spring conference earlier this year, Intel officials unveiled the new Core micro-architecture, which has served as the basis of a revamped Xeon line and its new flagship, the Intel Core2 Duo processor. Today Otellini added the micro-architecture will also serve as the basis of the industry’s first quad-core processors for PCs and servers targeted at the gaming and content creation communities.

 

The new Intel Core2 Extreme quad-core processor will be shipped in November and will feature a dramatic 70 percent performance improvement over today’s Intel Core2 Extreme processor. The company’s mainstream quad-core processor will be shipped in the first quarter of 2007 and will be called the Intel Core2 Quad processor. For servers, the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5300 series brand for dual processor servers will be shipped this year and a new low-power 50-watt Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor L5310 for blade servers that will be shipped in the first quarter of 2007.

 

“More than ever processing power matters, even as the need to reduce heat, extend battery life, and reduce electricity costs in data centers becomes more critical,” said Otellini. “Silicon technology is at the heart of the solution. It is how we get there.”

 

Separately, Intel announced it has worked with satellite TV market leader DirecTV to integrate its newest set-top box, the DirecTV Plus HD DVR, into the Viiv consumer platform, which was first unveiled back in January at the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

 

Using the integrated digital media adapter (DMA) functionality through a simple software download, users of the High-Definition, Digital-Video-Recorder-enabled set-top box can access files that were previously locked away on the PC. The software is expected to be available by December.

 

The two companies are in the final stages of testing and verification.

 

Yesterday, DirecTV established its fourth owned-and-operated contact center in Missoula, Montana, to providing technical support to more than 15.5 million customers specifically for products and services such the DirecTV Plus HD DVR set-top box.

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.