The first challenger pounces on Intel's major Achilles heel: its mediocre graphics performance. The Atom itself is an efficient performer, but the accompanying GMA 500 and 950 chipsets baulk at gaming and HD video playback.
Nvidia joins chipset competition
Nvidia's Ion platform remedies this by taking Intel's graphics out of the equation and employing its own significantly more capable GeForce 9400M graphics chipset.
Ultimately, the limited horsepower of the Atom CPU limits how much graphical grunt Nvidia can bring to the party, but even modest Ion-based systems such as Acer's Revo are capable of light gaming and 1080p video playback.
And with Lenovo's forthcoming IdeaPad S12, Nvidia's Ion finds its first portable home in a sleek-looking 12in netbook. If the projected pricing is to be believed - just $499 in the US, $50 more than the standard non-Ion spec - the S12 will blur the line between ultraportable and netbook like no other.
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| Has Intel's Atom seen the best of its days already? |
Nvidia also has something up its sleeve that could potentially nudge Atom out of the netbook world
altogether - Tegra. It's a simple recipe: take an ARM processor, the likes of which you'd normally find
in a smartphone, and bolt on a graphics unit capable of HD video decoding along with the south bridge,
north bridge and memory controllers.
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| Nvidia's Tegra could be the secret to disposing of Intel in the netbook chip wars |
The benefit? Well, thanks to its drastically lower power consumption and more efficient architecture, Tegra promises not hours', but days' worth of battery life.
There's one serious downside, however. The ARM architecture means Tegra can't run x86 software such as Windows XP, Vista or 7, so it has to make do with Windows CE embedded and the promise of a 3D rendered GUI on top.
Intel isn't entirely unprepared for all of this, however, and its Pine Trail platform - slated for a late 2009 arrival, though we've heard rumours of delays - promises new heights for Atom.
With a graphics processing unit built into the CPU, it too promises lower power consumption and improved performance, and while running a standard x86-based operating system too.
Whether it will turn the tide against Nvidia's best is yet to be seen, but whoever wins the battle, it's going to be an exciting few years for the netbook.