CEO Paul Otellini might be retiring, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing the company’s future down one bit. Intel has now announced it is entering into a deal with Creative, the company once best known for things like the “Sound Blaster” sound card series. The new deal will basically allow Intel to license out GPU techonlogy from Creative’s ZiiLabs. It’s hard to say exactly what Intel will do with the new technology but more than likely it will allow the company to create its own more advanced GPU/CPU processors. Taking a guess here, this could be used to help strengthen their tablet efforts and will allow them to do some of the same things that AMD can do thanks to its ownership of graphics company ATI. While Intel might not be huge in the mobile world yet, the company seems dedicated to the x86 platform and so far its efforts are starting to pay off. In many ways, x86 is better than ARM in the Windows world. The biggest reason is all about compatibility. Until the day Microsoft kills the desktop altogether, legacy support from Intel chips make them very useful. I won’t pretend to fully know what all the acquired licenses are capable of bringing to the table, but it might also be possible that the 3D/GPU licenses could also be used to strengthen Intel’s position in the graphics world. Up until now, Intel graphics have been sort a cuss word among gamers particularly. Could this eventually change? What do you think of the new Creative licensing partnership? What do you think Intel will do with its new 3D and GPU licenses from ZiiLabs? [ source ]]]>
