Intel unveils new 4 series chipset at Computex

At the Intel keynote today at Computex, EVP Sean Maloney officially unveiled the new 4 Series chipsets and prognosticated a bright, high definition future delivered via WiMAX.

Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney was "more optimistic than ever," about the future, thanks to all the innovations on the Computex show floor in Taipei, Taiwan. Perhaps he's not so much giving credit to the industry as giving himself a high-five for the sheer mass of Intel-powered hardware being shown off this week.

For the benefit of those who doubt the desktop's validity, Maloney was proud to display the "second tower built in Taiwan" of over 340 desktop motherboards using Intel chips that were announced today alone. Additionally, he noted that there are over 100 other products based upon Intel technologies at the show and that the company's Atom processors are being spotlighted in "every booth."

Self-aggrandizement aside, Intel's position in the market is firm and forward-looking. Maloney spoke of the developing trends where both lower cost and lower power computers can coexist with the most powerful based upon the user's need for constant connection. "The next era of growth [is] people each owning one or more computing devices. People have an innate desire to be 'connected' all the time and see personalized, mobile technology as the way to meet that need."

That need has yielded the Intel 4 Series, the company's latest chipsets, which were shown in a couple of quick demos. The first took place on a desktop system running EA's twitch shooter Crysis. The potentially processor-hungry game was being streamed to a MID, which behaved like a controller, manipulating the action on both the desktop's screen as well as the handheld device's.

A further demo showed a Blu-ray video playing back on the Intel 4 Series G45 all in-chip with no video card rendering taking place.

With the growth in WiMAX mobile deployments, Maloney discussed the accessibility the mainstream user will have to his HD video content, photos, music, and games in the near future.

"In addition to these newer segments -- lower cost, smaller power -- Intel is hardcore committed to staying out there," he told attendees, "pushing away, breaking the limits -- faster, faster, faster -- because we know that microprocessor performance gets used up."