Always ready for another nice-sounding name to woo the market with, Intel is coming out with a program dubbed "Cedar Wood", in partnership with many well known motherboard manufacturers. MSI, Gigabyte, AOpen and others will be joining Intel in a program that will gear components for sale as complete systems, or at least bundled systems, rather than individual components. This doesn't mean you won't be able to buy a single part if you wish - it's mostly meant for retailers and PC manufacturers that are looking for better ways to guarantee system compatibility.
Through the Cedar Wood plan, Intel expects to follow its "platformization" strategy in the DIY ("do-it-yourself") desktop PC segment to pave the way for its Viiv consumer PC platform and Averill platform for business desktops, according to the sources. The chip giant will reportedly launch its Averill dual-core platform for business-use desktop PCs in the third quarter of 2006.
Not everyone is sure of how good of an idea this is, because of the potential for increased support demanded from the resellers and the potential to erode a segment of the enthusiast market.