(PR excerpt) — At the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, CA today, Intel announced new industry building blocks that bring the vision of the Digital Home closer to reality. Available immediately are Digital Home reference and concept platforms, and ten powerful UPnP tools that underscore Intel's support of the Digital Home vision.

The “Statesboro” reference platform will assist OEMs and motherboard makers to develop new PC systems this year that broadcast digital photos and music to TVs and stereos throughout the consumer's home. Statesboro is an implementation tool designed for developers that showcases the 2003 Digital Home vision. The reference platform is a complete, validated system solution featuring key technologies in support of the Digital Home usage models, as described in the Desktop Platform Vision Guide for 2003. These technologies include: Intel 3.06GHz Pentium 4 Processor with Hyper-Threading Technology 1, “Springdale” chipset, Dualband 802.11 Wireless NIC, Serial ATA Hard Disk Drive, Dual Channel DDR Memory, and a DVD/CD-RW Optical Disk Drive.

The new concept platform, codenamed “Powersville”, showcases additional levels of Digital Home experiences, such as wireless streaming video and personal video recording, which consumers can expect as included PC features in the 2004 time frame. Powersville is designed to provide an early demonstration of experiences and technologies in order to highlight innovation opportunities for the PC industry.

At IDF Fall 2002, Intel showcased a new PC peripheral, called a digital media adapter, that creates the link between PC and CE (consumer electronic) devices. It can receive digital media from the PC using 802.11 wireless networking and UPnP technologies, and can connect to TVs and stereos using standard A/V cables — much like a DVD player. [Editor's note: the digital media adapter showcased by Intel at IDF Fall 2002 was based on a PXA210 XScale processor running an embedded Linux operating system, as discussed in this LinuxDevices.com article.]

To further accelerate the development of digital media adapters and Digital Home enabling PC platforms, Intel is announcing the immediate availability of a variety of UPnP technology tools. Greatly reducing development time for makers of devices and applications, these UPnP tools include support for several operating system and authoring environments: Device Spy, Device Sniffer, Service Author, Device Validator, Device Relay, Network Light, AV Media Controller, AV Wizard, AV Media Server and AV Renderer. These are available here.

Additional details on these building blocks and toolkits for the digital home are available here.

 
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