In an interview conducted by Laptop Magazine, Intel Director of Netbook Marketing Anil Nanduri claims that NVIDIA’s ION chipset for Atom CPUs introduces “unnecessary additional cost and the other trade-offs make it less desirable.”
To run multimedia you don’t need a huge graphics chip. And that’s what those third-party decoder solutions will show in the marketplace. There are much more innovative ways to get multimedia capabilities that will continue to provide lower power and longer battery life. In terms of usages, netbooks are not meant for gaming. You can run Internet games fine today with the existing solutions. We believe (Ion) adds unnecessary additional cost and the other trade-offs make it less desirable. Our customers have the option to design netbooks how they want to but ultimately the market is going to decide.
Meanwhile, real-world netbook users have discovered that high definition YouTube videos and even relatively intense Flash games prove too much for an Intel platform, while the ION’s hardware Flash acceleration makes quick work of the material.
The NVIDIA ION is based on the single-chip GeForce 9400M core logic which packs a DirectX 10.0-compatible GeForce 9000-series processor in with dual channel DDR3 support, PCI Express 2.0 x16 and x4 lanes, Serial ATA, USB and GbE. The Atom-compatible chipset offers 720p and 1080p support, as well as GPU-assisted Flash playback that puts ION-based products many steps ahead of Intel’s Atom chipsets in the tasks important to users.
More interestingly, netbooks based on ION continue to offer performance that is superior to Intel’s new, but only incrementally superior Pine Trail platform.
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