Intel/Skype Shippers

February 8th, 2006

Well, this is silly vertical integration. According to PC Magazine:

Skype and Intel today announced plans for Internet-based voice and video communications

…

The first tangible result of these efforts is the availability of free, ten-way voice conference calling for up to ten people in Skype 2.0 (code for version 2.0 went gold on January 5th). Previously, the limit was 5-way conferencing, and it’s still that way on even a dual-core AMD system. But anyone with an Intel Centrino Duo laptop, Intel Pentium D desktop, or Pentium Extreme Edition processor should be able to take advantage of the 10-way conference-calling function.

The brand of your processor determines whether you have full access to a product. If you use AMD, you get a crippled version. No doubt they’ll say something about the fact that you need a powerful processor in order to use this feature but it doesn’t explain why an equal specification processor from rival companies doesn’t run it.