Intel's effort to lure Hollywood to PCs with new chips

Intel showed off its second-generation Core chips at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Or rather, the company showed off what the chips could do, particularly the graphics capabilities that aim to make separate graphics chips redundant.

The most impressive thing to me was the ability to render photorealistic, 3-D images in real time. Oh and yes, the images move -- for example, mimicking the expression of whoever's facing the computer's webcam. One can imagine all sorts of gaming applications, as well as some not-so-welcome capabilities to assume someone else's (virtual) persona. The company also unveiled Intel Insider, a new security feature on the chips designed to enable more circumvention-resistant electronic locks. The technology -- essentially, the ability to embed into the chip itself part of the security protecting a piece of content, so that the content can be unlocked only by the chip -- was good enough that at least one major studio, Warner Bros., was persuaded to make high-definition versions of its movies available for downloading.