Intel’s Montevina to Do HD DVD and Blu-ray

Intel's forthcoming Montevina mobile platform will feature a 45nm architecture, built-in WiMAX capabilities...and chip-level support for both Blu-ray and HD DVD.

Although it’s sure to be a move which irks both Sony and Toshiba, the great format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray got another fence-sitter today as mammoth chipmaker Intel outlined its forthcoming Montevina mobile computing platform at the Intel Developer Forum today. Designed as the follow-up to the company’s successful Santa Rosa notebook architecture, Montevina will use the 45nm Penryn processor architecture in its CPUS, offer integrated WiMAX high speed wireless broadband capabilities—and refuse to take sides in the high definition format war by offering chip-level support for both Blu-ray and HD DVD.

Intel’s , the announcement follows AMD’s commitment earlier this year to support both HD DVD and Blu-ray in its forthcoming Puma mobile platform. Both mobile architectures are expected to ship in mid-2008.

For chip manufacturers, offering low-level support for both disc formats isn’t a tremendous burden: the formats share the same H.264, VC9, and MPEG-2 codecs. However, onboard support for either platform will enable system makers to easily offer either HD DVD or Blu-ray capability—or both—to meet customer needs, rather than having to engineer separate solutions for each format. In the computing industry, Microsoft and Toshiba are HD DVD’s strongest backers, with HP on favorable terms; Sony, Philips, and Apple are firmly in the Blu-ray camp, although the latter has yet to offer any Blu-ray hardware on its Macintosh systems.

Given the lack of interest consumers have expressed in either HD DVD or Blu-ray to this point, Montevina’s WiMAX capabilities may actually be more important to notebook users when the systems reach market sometime next year. According to Intel Mobility Group’s David Perlmutter: "Mobile users have an insatiable appetite for and want even more mobility, connectivity and a full Internet on their smaller devices. Intel will satisfy those needs by delivering our latest 45nm processors and WiMAX to notebooks, as well as Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) in 2008, and also using some of these technologies to bring an affordable computing and Internet experience to emerging communities and economies around the world."