Nvidia wants a piece of the Atom pie, not in the CPU sense, but in the chipset market.
Nvidia has just announced what they call the Ion platform. The pairing of an Atom and a 9400M chipset.
David Henry, general manager of MCP business at Nvidia:
Henry pointed out that Atom processors have a high price/performance ratio, but said that, in his opinion, limiting them to 945GSE and 945GC chipsets will only limit future development. Therefore Nvidia hopes to work with PC makers to form a platform combining its MCP7A or MCP79 chipsets with Atom processors to significantly boost the graphics performance of netbooks and nettops.
And right he is, this is probably the only way to have 1080p running well on a single-core Atom; add some digital outputs and you have a nice soup.
I would still also want to have 64-bits and a dual-core on netbooks, but having this on the desktop will be a good step forward for the Atom.
It is clear that Intel needs some help with the current Atom platform, the question is if they want it at all. We'll probably see some struggle but Intel will eventually allow 3rd party chipsets, the when is the misty part.
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