Intel Cancels LCOS Development

kfstark writes "It looks like the sub $2000 42" flat panel TV has been pushed back for a while. Intel has announced they are cancelling their Liquid Crystal on Silicon development. Guess I'll have to pick out a different gift for for the umm... kids." Earlier we reported their plans to delay their launch of the LCOS chips. Sadly, now it would seem they've been scrapped altogether.

Comments

Reality Meet Intel.

[tomstdenis]

Seems like they're falling-through on many of their more recent promisses? That couldn't possibly be to steal thunder from other people...... no way!

Hey intel, do what many of us said years ago, ditch the P4 crap, admit that it was a mistake and go the normal high IPC route already. K8's are already smoking you at "non-gaming" [re: serious work] tasks and at least as good if not better at the little fps's anyways.

So take your Pentium-M and advance it already!

Tom

Bad year for Intel, technology wise?

[hattig]

Not much has been going for Intel this year, and now they've cancelled these chips as well. Sure, maybe they wouldn't have got a good return on them, but why not put the price up a bit to compensate at the beginning?

With all the delays on the processor side of things, with only the Pentium-M still executing to plan (well, sans 533MHz FSB at the moment), and this new issue, what is going on at Intel?

Re:Bad year for Intel, technology wise?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

It's called the mud on the wall principle. There was no clear-cut path the Industry has been going in for some time. They simply dumped money into a pile of projects in hopes that one would pay off.

With the explosion in laptop sales, it would seem that the Pentium-M was a good bet. They simply had options on a few other racehorses as well.

What does this have to do with cheap flat panels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung predicts that a price for the 42" PDP will drop to $2099 in the next year and to $1000 in 2006.

Back to back product cancelations?

[peterdaly]

What up with Intel? Just a few days they announced they don't think they can pull off a 4Ghz chip. Today they announce this?

This doesn't bode well for Intel's R&D/Engineering leader image. They really don't need things like this at a time where AMD is eating their lunch for the first time ever, or at least starting to take bites.

I wonder if this is a sign of things to come from Intel.

-Pete

Re:I am curious as to what exactly the trouble is.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

TV's may be a huge market, but with the advent of Best-Buy, Walmart, and cheap imports from China, there are almost no margins left in it. You could charge $5000 for a 48" Tv 5 years ago. Today, price it more than $1000 and it will collect dust on the shelf.

And it's a market that already has an 800 lb Gorilla.

Sony has been manufacturing far more complex chips, figuring out how to make them uber cheap, and has brand name recognition in the consumer electronics industry. They also sell their cheap stuff under several other brands. If Intel started trying to eat into Sony's lunch pail, Viaos would probably start running a Sony designed x86 compadible.

Re:I am curious as to what exactly the trouble is.

[imsabbel]

i think they underestimated the R&D costs involved in producing the panels (its nothing like cpus..) AND they realized that they can make more money per fab producing flash or processors than the relatively large LCOS-dies (a 200mm^2 p4/opteron can be sold for a few 100$, but a chip for a tv cant...)

Intel can only be doing this because of AMD

[twfry]

Basically AMD has the better server option over Xeon for the next year or two. If it lasts any longer than that Intel will lose dominance and they know that. Because of this they have done the following to refocus on their core process, microprocessors.

• Canceled - Next versions of the P4, Tejas
• Canceled - +4GHz chips with ever diminishing returns
• Canceled - The Alviso chip for notebooks
• Realized they had to extend 64-bits to the Xeon/P4 line
• Realized they had to make Itanium run x86-64

So now they have a crappy processor core and to save themselves they are throwing every resource available at making dual core chips because AMD is ahead of them on that by 6-12 months and it is going to kill their cash cow business.

LCOS and DRM

[phage434]

I have always thought that the real reason for Intel's interest in LCOS was the ability to decrypt content and display it from the same chip. This would make most attacks on DRM protected material quite difficult. By making LCOS displays on the chip technology as the decryption/decompression engine, they could control the DRM food chain quite effectively. Meanwhile, don't forget that there are still many players successfully manufacturing LCOS displays. Intel just is not one of them. You may still be able to buy one for Christmas.

Sony "black's out" the competition.

[holland_g]

IMHO, the Wavelength Selectable black front projector screen demonstrated by Sony at the 2004 Society for Information Display conference in Seattle will make anyone reconsider a LCOS, LCD, or PDP purchase. The InFocus DLP based projectors would do quite well matched with the Sony screen.

Basically it makes placing a projector and screen in the solarium a viable option.

Brillian's LCOS engine looked nice at the show, but this screen got me more excited.

Reference Links:

http://www.insightmedia.info/emailblasts/InsightMe diaAnnouncesBestBuzzAwards.htm

http://www.extremetech.com/slideshow_viewer/0,2393 ,l=&s=1005&a=128243&po=10,00.asp

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB108742977 261939595-IRjg4Nllal3nZyva3qHbqyCm4,00.html

What??? You're a troll.

[megalomang]

You think that Intel cancelled LCOS so they could shift resources to their processor line? You think they cancelled LCOS because of AMD? You don't think that TI's extremely successful DLP has anything to do with it? That's absurd. You, sir, are a troll.

Basically AMD has the better server option over Xeon for the next year or two
Really? Please... substantiate this with facts. What the hell are you talking about?

Canceled - Next versions of the P4, Tejas
Tejas was cancelled. Next version of P4 will still come out. There will definitely be a dual-core solution out early next year to fill the void that the 4GHz P4 left.

Canceled - The Alviso chip for notebooks
Really? I heard it was only delayed. Here is a press release from a month ago indicating the Alviso chip set will be released with Dothan, the second generation Centrino, later this year. Since AMD chipset business is stagnated, and AMD has failed to gain market share in laptop processors, this will be a big win for Intel.

Realized they had to extend 64-bits to the Xeon/P4 line
They obviously realized this years ago. They just didn't tell you about it because they wanted to give more momentum to 64-bit Itanium.

Realized they had to make Itanium run x86-64
This is still a rumor, probably true, though. But since Itanium has always been able to run all P4 code in legacy mode, would x86-64 be an exception?

So go back to how is any of your FUD relevant to LCOS? It's not. Intel is obviously getting down to the fundamentals across the board. Trimming off projects that will not be successful, refocusing those that could, and pursuing only those that have growth potential in the future. LCOS is just another part of that.

This demonstrates that Intel is willing to play the survival game the way that AMD and other competitors play. What mileage will AMD get out of saying "we were the first ones to publicly announce an x86-64 solution"? Big deal. If they fail to execute on it, they got nowhere. If anything, AMD has more to be concerned about than before.