CES 2011: Intel WiDi 2.0 Brings New Media Extenders
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 10, 2011 2:33 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Sandy Bridge
- CES 2011
- WiDi
- Trade Shows
One major feature of mobile Sandy Bridge is support for Intel WiDi 2.0. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, WiDi 2.0 uses SNB’s Quick Sync engine to encode, in real time, the frame buffer and send it over 802.11n to a compatible WiDi receiver attached to your TV. The WiDi receiver decodes the content and displays your mobile desktop on whatever TV you have attached to the WiDi receiver, wirelessly. All you need is a SNB laptop with an Intel WiFi controller. Unlike wireless HDMI, the cost is much lower since you’re relying on the host CPU to do the video encoding. All you have to pay for is the cost of the WiDi receiver.
With the original WiDi, Netgear was the only company that made a WiDi receiver. The receiver was fine but generally it’s nice to see more than one company offering a technology. This time around Intel plans to have many more partners with WiDi receivers. At CES last week Intel had a D-Link WiDi receiver hooked up to a SNB notebook:
Sandy Bridge WiDi also supports HDCP and 1080p, so you can now stream Blu-ray content from a SNB notebook to a TV connected via WiDi.
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therealnickdanger - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link
1080p video and lossless audio? No compression?vol7ron - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link
This is one of the things I was curious about, which I wrote you in an email (not sure you got)?Still curious about the OLEDs that were at the CES last year, especially the 6mm (Samsung?) one. Curious if any vendor has had any input on the longevity/improvements of the technology.
BugblatterIII - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link
The previous version was a bit pointless at 720p, at least for me. Competing solutions required plugging stuff into your laptop, which again was pointless (might as well plug in an HDMI lead).This could finally be useful; have the laptop wirelessly on my lap and still use my monitor or TV as a second screen. Not a big deal but a nice-to-have.
Thing is I'm not sure how many people actually want this, apart from the geek-appeal. I was looking for a laptop with it for my gf and even the laptops that had it barely mentioned it; it's certainly not seen as a killer feature.
vol7ron - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link
Are you kidding? I'd get it for YouTube/Netflix/Hulu alone. Does it stream audio though?hybridE4t - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
I'd like to know what the CPU overhead is of streaming the desktop to the TV. Ideally I'd like to be able to play games on my future SNB laptop and use my HDTV as a monitor. Wireless streaming is appealing to me but not if it will noticeably impact performance.