> I've never been able to figure out what the heck Intel is thinking.
> They make chips, not software, formats, standards or working

Well, chips are just software that has been compiled into silicon,
and strangely, when you comile your code into silicon, you don't have
the same crowd yelling at you to GPL it. If you slow down innovation
by making the code release cycle depend on chip fabs, and justify the
expense by saying "well, you can touch it can't you?", then somehow
people think you're not ripping them off. I mean, we software guys
rip everyone off because we "live under the false assumption that
software is manufacturing", but to artificially add manufacturing to
the process by burning code in the chips is just fine... (Real
efficient, too). Intel is getting into switches and routers now,
which are the classic software-that-became-hardware. There is
another nice thing about compiling your software into silicon, if you
sell to large corporate interests -- hardware is a physical thing
(you can touch it, can't you?) so you can depreciate it, and
corporate budgets for physical assets are usually much more liberal.

As for their involvement in P2P, I think I can guess.. Remember the
outrage about five years ago when Intel put the unique identifier on
every chip with instruction codes that could read it? At that time,
they claimed it was being put there to make Internet transactions
more secure. Everyone else thought it was "big brother", and the
whole thing was scuppered. But believe it or not, the whole thing
*did* have some merits, and I was sorely disappointed to see it go.
I guess we're OK without it, but ... enter y2k+1, and P2P is the
rage. Intel sees potential for security problems, and realizes that
the only way to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks is with cooperation
from the CPU (same as their claim in the last controversy, which was
equally valid). So ka-bam! The chip_id scheme is resurrected, just
in a different skin. I bet they figured out how to make a
chip "trusted" this time without the same old privacy risks, but
that's just speculation.. In any case, Intel is very much interested
in digital media - video, audio, etc. as the next phase of PC
evolution, and they know that their boxes will need to have the
ability to protect content-owners from piracy, or else Sony will just
ship a playstation/stereo/PC all in one box with the digital media
protection built-in. They are pushing standards for digital media
protection (and remember that P2P ala Napster is a *perfect*
distribution mechanism for digital media, with a few changes -- I
mean, you get edge-caching based on hot items built-in for free...).
They are trying to be careful to not go too far, as the CPRM case
shows. (see: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15718.html) So
I think is not so much about P2P as it is about the PC of the future,
and if Intel doesn't take leadership and figure out how to make the
privacy/digital-rights thing work (that's pretty much what they've
limited their code on sourceforge to so far), then they will be
eclipsed by the "real" hardware vendors like Sony/Matsushita, who
have utterly terrible track records on standards since their entire
devices are proprietary.