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Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang might just be the Charles Barkley of the tech world. Like the ex-NBA player, Huang knows how to stir the media with colorful quotes (and for all we know, Huang may have a mean jump shot too), just as he did during a financial analyst meeting by promising to "open a can of whoop ass" when discussing the integrated graphics market. Seizing the opportunity, Huang this week took another verbal shot at Intel, this time in regards to the netbook market.
"We’re all trying to figure out what a netbook is. From my perspective, anything that has an X86 processor and has Windows running on it is really a PC," Huang said in an interview with Laptop. "If I were to ask a million people, What do you call something with a Microsoft operating system called Windows and X86 processor from Intel, I would think that 99.9999 percent of them, except for the Intel marketing person, would call it a PC."
While Huang went on to diss the netbook as "a low-cost PC that doesn't work that well," his issue isn't with Intel's Atom processor, which he described as "really terrific." Instead, it's the graphics that Huang sees as deficient, saying current iterations of the Atom platform don't run anything well from Electronic Arts, Adobe, and Microsoft. That changes, says Huang, when paired with Nvidia's Ion, which introduces Nvidia's GeForce 9400M chipset into the equation. "Atom plus Ion is just a fabulous machine: It's small, low powered, and full featured in every way," said Huang.
There's still no release date on when Nvidia's Ion will materialize in retail form, only that it will be available soon at an expected price point of $399.
Image Credit: APCMag.com
Comments are closed on this article
Keith E. Whisman
February 03, 2009 at 11:47am
It seems Huang was rather reasonable this time around. Perhaps we can one day expect to find an Nvidia NetBook CoProcessor to speed up processing in 2D and help with Math and audio.
Also would be nice to see a Atom with an integrated memory controller.
And a netbook with a dedicated lowpower high performance dedicated 3D GPU.
And a Netbook with some sort of an optical drive. For god sakes man this is the 21st century.
ogremustcrush
February 03, 2009 at 10:27am
The 945G chipset used in all the Atom machines is pretty terrible compared to modern chipsets. Not only is the graphics perfomance staggeringly low (945G was Intel's first chipset that could even run Aero on vista... kind of,) but the chipset itself is a horrible match with the low power profile of the Atom processor. It hasn't been streamlined for low power at all, and its built on a process that is a few generations old. That and its lack of video decoding capability is also a bad match for the Atom, with a good enough GPU, an Atom based machine could have the grunt to handle 1080P, but not if the processor has to handle all the decoding tasks itself. 1080P decoding strictly on the CPU is enough to bring down even Core 2's if they are low clocked.
So yes, Nvidia makes a very, very good point. I had considered buying an MSI wind barebones as a HTPC box, but the 945 chipset is one of the biggest things that turned me away.
