It was bound to happen but Intel’s fancy new Sandy Bridge chips that is headed to new computers has Hollywood happy like a hooker on crack.
For those who don’t know about this new chip it is Intel’s newest offering that combines both a CPU (computer processor) with a GPU (graphics processor); which does away with the need of a separate video card without giving up video quality.
Except these chips come with a little sumpin sumpin extra – lock down digital rights management (DRM).
According to The Inquirer this has got everyone in Hollywood all warm and fuzzy:
Apparently the media cartels are dead keen to get their content on PCs that are locked-down even to the level of the chip.
Mooly Eden, Intel’s VP and general manager of the PC client group said that Intel’s embedded DRM allows content to be streamed to computers with Sandy Bridge chips and that Chipzilla is making deals with all the studios and content distributors to make it available.
So while punters will get saddled with DRM on their computers, Intel thinks that it can suck them in and buy them off with improved multimedia processing.
As of right now AMD and Nvidia aren’t going down this road but you can be sure that if there isn’t some kind of consumer backlash against this idea they will be forced to just to stay competitive. When that happens we all get screwed.
Thanks Intel.
image courtesy of Fork In A Toaster
