Introduction
ION01
Intel's Atom processor constitutes the beating heart of practically all
netbooks on the market today. Low on power and just about reasonable on
performance, Intel is keen to keep the surrounding high-growth market
to itself. To
that end, the chip giant prefers to bundle the Atom processor with one
of its
own chipsets, selling a three-chip package instead of one. The
accompanying chipsets provide little more than the logic by which the
CPU - sometimes embedded - communicates with the system, with
integrated-graphics performance
nothing to shout home about.
Intel currently charges $44 for the Atom N270 - 1.6GHz, 512KB L2 cache,
single-core, HT - if bought in one-thousand-unit quantities. Pair the
CPU up with the 945GSE chipset and it'll cost you $83, but probably a
whole heap less if you're the size of Acer or ASUS. That's why we see
netbooks
retail from just £150; the guts of the system are cheap as
chips to the right people.
Knowing that netbooks are limited on space and approved Intel chipsets
provide less-than stellar multimedia and gaming performance, NVIDIA
thinks it can lend a helping hand by grafting some GPU know-how on to
Atom's shoulders, and that's how the ION platform was born.
We're taking a look at a nettop computer, to see if Atom + GeForce
9400M makes sense in the £700 space. Read on to find out.
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