Intel Sees Communications As Company's Next Frontier

WSJdpatton writes "Intel is mounting a long-term campaign to turn personal computers into more reliable tools for calling and conferencing. Intel business-client architecture director Steve Grobman argues that instead of exploiting the Internet to lower communications costs, the next phase is about adding new features. Among the benefits for business: broader access to online meetings with advanced features such as TiVo-style playback, instant captioning of conversations — or even translation into multiple languages. 'That technology could be a foundation for companies to add improvements such as the ability to identify the current speaker during a conference call ... He eventually expects advanced features -- such as automatic transcription or translation of conferences. Intel has used deals to advance its plans. A February 2006 partnership with Skype included joint development to tailor the service for Intel's dual-core chips, and free PC-based conferencing for as many as 10 participants.'"

Comments

VoIP?

[el_flynn]

With VoIP, a lot of resources are dedicated to make two or more endpoints (usually VoIP phones) talk to each other, especially when each device is talking a different codec. A lot of codecs exist - G.729, G.726, GSM, WAV, Speex et al. And so there's stuff in the middle that's required to translate from one codec to another (this is called transcoding), and at the same time take care of other audio quality issues such as echo cancellation, comfort noise generation, DTMF etc. Usually some sort of PABX takes care of this, but at the expense of CPU processing power.

What I'd like to see is for Intel to come up with a specialized chip that is good at the computation and bit-moving required to do these kinds of transcoding and DSP-type functionality. I've heard from someone in the know that when these things are done in software on generic Intel Pentium/Xeon/whatever type chips, they're not that good at doing it (how accurate that is I don't know, maybe its hearsay).

Now if Intel can throw their resources into creating something like this, that would be very nice for the VoIP space.