After a long wait, it looks like a couple of bona fide ION netbooks are on their way. And Samsung seems to be beating Lenovo to the punch.
Intel has been under fire lately for some dubious practices regarding their relationship with it’s bread and butter – the computer manufacturers. The European Commission recently issued a $1.4 billion fine (yes, that would be billion,) and the FTC could be on the company’s heels too before they’ve had time to empty their piggy bank. According to the fiscal authorities, Intel has misused its dominance in the processor market by more or less forcing the manufacturers to choose their CPUs over main competitor AMDs offerings. Possibly by manipulating rebates to favor its own products, but even bribes could be involved according to EU high-up’s.
As you may already know, Intel and Nvidia have also been doing a few rounds of legal battles – the least interesting being the FSB-to-QPI-to-whatever debacle over motherboard components, but also over Nvidia’s ION platform, which is primarily intended to be coupled with the Intel Atom CPU. Thusly, it will replace Intel’s ageing GMA950 graphics controller in favor of an integrated piece of graphics circuitry much like the Nvidia 9400M found in Apple’s MacBook lineup.
The Nvidia ION is infinitely more powerful than the GMA and would enable netbooks to play HD video and even do some light gaming. Intel is not particularly fond of this idea either by the looks of it, as their own existing as well as upcoming solutions inevitably bite the dust in comparison. However, Lenovo and now Samsung are stepping up to the task of producing some nice and shiny ION-based netbooks without fear of reprisals from the semiconductor behemoth.
Lenovo’s upcoming netbook barely qualifies for the mini-laptop segment, as it’s a larger 12-inch model. Samsung is taking it a (tiny) step further by releasing one with an 11.6-inch screen with the eye-pleasing 1366×768 resolution. Other than the Nvidia ION, however, it has all the standard equipment that we’re used to seeing in netbooks – an Intel Atom N280 processor, a 160GB hard drive and a mere 1GB of RAM (most likely to be shared with the GPU). It will still be a sight to behold though, and the release of Windows 7 should change the impairing XP policy and allow it some additional RAM. It won’t be as cheap as most netbooks though – rumors say that the introductory price tag will be about $799 – another factor that clearly separates it from the small-and-cheap category.
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