Although Intel's wildly popular Atom processor was originally conceived for mobile Internet devices with an eye toward eventually trickling into smartphones, it quickly caught on with netbooks and has since carved out a sizable chunk of the mobile landscape. The concept of cheap, fast-enough computing soon migrated from portables to the desktop, where it spawned a new class of delightfully small nettop systems. With Atom now available with two physical cores and an economic downturn causing many to tighten their budgets, the nettop looks to have a promising future, especially in cheap, media-centric PCs.

Except for one problem: while the Atom has just enough horsepower to deal with common, everyday tasks, the platform it's available on is an outdated throwback. Intel pairs Atom with its 945G-series chipsets, which first saw life way back in 2005. The 945 series isn't horribly lacking in the peripherals department, and its performance is acceptable given the Atom's modest aspirations on that front. But the chipset's Graphics Media Accelerator 950 is several generations behind the curve. The GMA 950's game compatibility is flaky, and its performance dismal. Even worse, it's unable to accelerate high-definition video playback. That might not be the sort of thing you need in a netbook with a limited 1024x600 display resolution, but a desktop or home theater PC plugged into a real monitor or high-definition TV is an entirely different story.

The Atom's antiquated chipset is clearly limiting the processor's appeal for some devices, but help has arrived from Nvidia in the form of the Ion reference design. More a new application than fresh silicon, the Ion platform pairs the Atom with the very same GeForce 9400 integrated graphics chipset you'll find on motherboards designed for Core 2 processors—except instead of arriving on a Micro ATX or Mini-ITX form factor, the Ion reference platform is about the size of a deck of cards.

You can read the entire article at The Tech Report.