Apple to adopt NVIDIA Ion platform for new Mac mini?

Tom's Hardware reports Apple may be planning to adopt the NVIDIA Ion platform for a new, smaller version of the Mac mini. The site heard from a NVIDIA partner that Apple was the first to receive samples of NVIDIA's Ion platform, and that this happened long before any of NVIDIA's other partners received prototype units.

One of the sites' sources claims Apple plans to debut the new Mac mini sometime in March of this year, around the same that that CeBIT happens in Hanover, Germany. Additionally, there's also a slight chance that Apple may also use the Ion platform for a new Apple TV, but nothing is confirmed yet.

Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro unibody notebooks already use Nvidia's 9400M GPU for graphics duties, and this GPU is precisely what Ion uses. The GPU is capable of full HD video decoding and also supports Nvidia's CUDA technology for more general purpose computing. Pairing up with the 9400M is Intel Atom 330 processor. The Atom 330 runs at a clock speed of 1.6 GHz on a 533 MHz front side bus and has two times the execution resources and L2 cache as the Atom 230.

Because of the size of the Ion platform, we can expect the new Mac Mini to be even smaller than the current generation unit. Our source also informed us that Apple will be launching the new Mac Mini sometime in March of this year, around the same time that CeBit happens.