Acer Group, the world’s third largest supplier of personal computers, is the first company to openly express interest towards Nvidia Ion platform aimed at low-cost systems running Intel Atom processor. Still, no actual plans have been confirmed.

“We always work with all partners and look at their solutions. […] The benefits of Nvidia Ion are great including the ability to playback high-def content. You will see us looking at this technology much closer in our second half [of the year] products,” said Sumit Agnihotry, Acer’s vice president of product marketing, in an interview with Laptomag.com web-site.

The launch of Nvidia’s Ion platform for Intel Atom central processing units (CPUs) was not supported either by an actual product launch or an open commitment to use Nvidia’s GeForce 9-series core-logic sets inside Atom-based netbooks or nettops. However, a month after the announcement chief executive officer of the company said in an interview that all the system makers were designing products based on the Ion platform that consists on Intel Atom processor and Nvidia GeForce 9400M core-logic.

Nvidia Ion enables DirectX 10, hardware-accelerated high-definition vide playback as well as some other advantages over currently available Intel Atom-based platforms. However, Nvidia’s solution consumes more power and is more expensive compared to Intel’s platform, which is a reason why it has not gained much popularity. Another reason for lackluster welcome of Nvidia Ion are strategic partnerships between Intel and makers of netbooks or nettops.

“Our partnership with Intel has been from the beginning and we initiated this segment together so we will continue to be a strategic partner with them on the netbook,” said Mr. Sumit.

Nvidia GeForce 9400M is a single-chip core-logic with DirectX 10-compatible GeForce 9-class graphics processor inside that also supports dual-channel DDR3 memory, PCI Express 2.0 x16 and x4 links, Serial ATA, USB, Gigabit Ethernet and so on. As all modern Nvidia GeForce integrated graphics processors, the novelty features hardware-accelerated high-definition video decoding and post-processing as well as supports various outputs, such as dual-link DVI-I, D-Sub, DisplayPort or HDMI.

Tags: Acer, Nvidia, Intel, Geforce, Nforce, Ion