Intel's first flagship processor for the digital home will be the Pentium D chip, the company said Wednesday.

In a presentation at the Intel Developer Forum, Don MacDonald, general manager of Intel's Digital Home business unit, said the Pentium D processor--formerly code-named Smithfield--will have two cores, and each core will have two "threads," which will provide the performance equivalent of four processors in a single system. The Pentium D, scheduled to ship later this year, also will use technology from Oplus Technologies, which Intel acquired late last month, to boost the chip giant's presence in the video processing space.

MacDonald demonstrated a single system that enabled a person in one room of a digital home to view high-definition video on a Windows Media Center-based PC while, using a Media Center Extender device, a person in another room played a PC-based, graphics-intensive video game without either application degrading.

MacDonald also presented a demo in which a Pentium D-based system using Intel Virtualization Technology partitioned a single system for five users in a home. The demo showed how five "virtual" operating systems could be created for five different users, isolating each from infecting others with spyware, adware or other malicious code downloaded from the Internet.

"This is the future of computing in the home," MacDonald said.

MacDonald also spoke on stage with Erik Flannigan, vice president of programming for Disney-Buena Vista Datacasting, which provides the Moviebeam online movie service. Flannigan said Moviebeam is working to add high-definition video to the next generation service and then bring it to Media PCs "so anyone in the living room or in the home has access to on-demand movies that are truly on-demand and easily stored."

Intel believes the digital home marks the intersection of Moore's and Metcalfe's laws of computing, MacDonald told the San Francisco conference's 5,000 attendees.

"It's the network effect," he said. "The value of [users'] products increases as they get them networked, and the value of the network increases as [users] add devices that connect to it."

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