Atom plus
As you will have seen from our coverage of Computex 2009, NVIDIA was focusing most of its attention on low power platforms this year. Both Tegra and ION have been spoken about for a while, but now we're starting to see end product appear.
So far the only system based around ION - NVIDIA's graphics designed primarily with Intel's Atom processor in mind - we've seen has been Acer's Revo.
But mainstream motherboard maker ASRock has decided to capitalize on the potential of Atom systems enhanced with NVIDIA graphics by launching the IONSTAR 330, a nettop (Intel's term nor an Atom based desktop) that appears to be intended specifically for the local SI and reseller channel.
ASRock is working with Dorset distie Spire to bring the IONSTAR to the UK. We spoke to ION product manager at Spire, Kevin Moffat, to get some more details. "The IONSTAR 330 is a small form factor system built around ION and the dual core Atom 330 and runs almost silently. It also comes with a DVD rewriter, 320GB HDD and 2GB DDR2," he said.
"It's extremely low power - about a quarter of a normal PC, but it has ten times more graphics power than a standard Atom-based netbook. This is especially important as soon GPU acceleration of Flash will be available."
