Posted on Thursday, December 25 2008 @ 18:14 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Yesterday there was an accusation that
Intel doesn't want Atom-based nettop or netbook platforms with the NVIDIA MCP79 chipset, but according to Intel this claim is false. Intel
denies it is squeezing out NVIDIA's new Ion platform and says there's nothing preventing vendors from using the NVIDIA Ion platform as the Atom can be bought as a stand-alone processor.
The report claimed "Intel will only sell Atom CPUs and corresponding chipsets in a bundle, but if hardware vendors are unable to buy just the Atom CPU, the Ion platform becomes too expensive for most applications."
Intel has been the subject of several anti-trust investigations already, and the above-described deal would smack of Microsoft's old habit of making OEMs pay a Windows royalty on every PC they shipped, whether it had Windows pre-loaded or not. The result was OEMs declined to ship PCs with competitive operating systems.
But an Intel spokesman said there is no exclusionary bundling in play.
"There is nothing preventing vendors from using the Ion platform. We sell Atom as a stand-alone processor, or as package with chipset," said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman, in an e-mail sent to InternetNews.com.
