NVIDIA's ion platform is a chipset for Intel's low power Atom processor. It's an "Atom CPU and a GeForce 9400M next to each other, a single SATA connector and a DDR3 SO-DIMM slot on the other side of the board. And this little thing is powerful enough to play HD video (8 - 25Mbps H.264)." The 9400M is the exact same graphics chip that's in the new MacBooks, but the entire chipset fits on a Pico ITX board which is considerably smaller than what's in a full size laptop.

This doesn't quite get into smartphone territory, but you could make a very small notebook ("netbook") with this that would really be full powered. I'll be very interested to see what people do with this. Due first half of 2009.
- jim 12-18-2008 3:28 pm

Here's a picture of the entire ion chipset (i.e., that's the whole computer minus the storage - either a hard drive or an SSD.) It's tiny!


- jim 12-21-2008 7:44 pm


sweet
- Skinny 12-21-2008 10:20 pm


I've got my eye on the Atom line. Intel isn't first to this market, but they'll probably be best. VIA is another vendor in this space. Why bother with RISC when an x86 has power this low? A real winner is tying the graphics chip (GPU) to the CPU to handle stuff that better fits in a GPU. Quite a package.
- mark 12-24-2008 3:00 am





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.