Posted on Wednesday, December 17 2008 @ 18:24 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
CNET
has some additional information about the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M platform for netbooks, along with a labeled picture of the reference board. This netbook/nettop platform will offer higher performance than Intel designs, and will cost no more than $50 extra.
The goal this time is to replace the Intel silicon that supports the Atom processor. Currently, Netbooks from companies such as Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell use the Atom and accompanying Intel silicon called a chipset.
...
"First, because Nvidia is in competition with (Intel), and second, because it will allow Netbook makers to build larger-screen Netbooks, which will encroach into the thin-and-light segment, and potentially cannibalize Intel's bigger mobile CPUs," he said.
In short, Nvidia wants to bring full-fledged PC features to the Netbook. "What we want to bring to the Atom-based platform is true visual computing," David Ragones, product line manager at Nvidia, said in an interview last week. "For example, high-definition video where Blu-ray (Disc video) processing now happens on the GPU (graphics processing unit), not the CPU (central processing unit), where you get a much more smooth experience."
