Nvidia's CEO Rags on Netbooks, Hypes Ion

Posted 02/03/2009 at 9:25am | by Paul Lilly

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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