Ion
NVIDIA's Ion platform is a GeForce 9400M GPU that's been adapted to work with Atom processors. It promises to bring the kind of graphics processing power you find in the latest Apple MacBooks to netbooks, thus allowing a lot more games and applications like Adobe Photoshop to be run.
Huang wouldn't be drawn on when we might start to see some of these Ion powered netbooks, but he did say: "In a few more months, people will realize that it will be possible to build the Ion platform around Atom," and "every OEM is doing a design around it".
Given that NVIDIA first started talking about Ion last year, our guess is that Huang is concerned that the buzz will have tailed off by the time Ion products finally come to market. What better way to generate some publicity than a spot of gentle Intel baiting?
He also spoke to Silicon Valley start-up news site Venture Beat, apparently from his own kitchen. In the interview Huang revealed that he thinks low cost devices are the future of the PC industry and that he's trying to work out what the "soul" of the PC will be, once this pesky recession passes.
"The netbook is not a new category; it's just a cheaper PC"
Huang opined that netbooks are popular primarily because they're cheap. "The netbook is not a new category; it's just a cheaper PC," he said. He also reminded us of NVIDIA's familiar refrain; that the GPU is becoming ever more important for all kinds of PC tasks.
The interview soon moved on to a potentially highly contentious issue in the evolution of the netbook: whether Intel will obstruct the adoption of Ion by effectively insisting that Atom runs with an Intel chipset. "You can't tell your customers what they are allowed to do," said Huang.
Or so he must be hoping, because by the end of the interview the boss of a company that has historically made its money from selling power hungry discrete graphics for desktop PCs, revealed that he thinks the future is low power. "There is a decade's worth of opportunity to move from a 60-watt world, where we are today, to a 10-watt world and then a 1-watt world," said Huang.
