Acer, Nvidia Unleash Ion-Based AspireRevo PC

"The AspireRevo is small and quiet enough to go anywhere, yet big enough to handle all the needs of your digital lifestyle," said Gianpiero Morbello, corporate vice president of marketing for Taipei, Taiwan-based Acer in a joint statement with Nvidia. "It's perfectly suited for the living room, because Nvidia Ion provides a brilliant graphics experience with digital photos, watching video and playing family-friendly games."

The AspireRevo features Intel's 1.6GHz Atom 230 central processor and Nvidia's newly branded Ion graphics chipset, which is essentially the same GeForce 9400M integrated GPU that first showed up at the expense of an Intel graphics alternative in the new lineup of MacBooks released by Apple last October. Towards the end of last year, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia began showing top PC makers an Ion-based reference design for small desktop PCs, also known as "nettops."

Acer's AspireRevo, just 7 inches on either side and a bit more than 1-inch deep, features up to 4GB of DDR2 memory and 250GB for storage. But the real story is what the tiny unit packs in terms of graphics horsepower and visual punch -- unlike the vast majority of its netbook cousins, the little nettop can run the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, promises 1080p video decoding and, according to Nvidia, provides "five to 10 times" the graphics performance of "traditional PCs with integrated graphics," the graphic chipmaker's oblique way of referencing Intel's graphics products.

In the time since Nvidia first began circulating the Ion, however, Intel began shipping its Atom N280 processor and accompanying GN40 chipset to narrow the performance gap with its smaller rival. The GN40 is also capable of 1080p video playback.

Other AspireRevo specs include a 4-in-1 card reader, six USB ports, HDMI/VGA outputs and gigabit Ethernet. Nvidia's Ion platform can also handle DirectX 10, enabling users to "play the latest PC games, like Spore, that you would have trouble doing on current Atom-based platforms," said David Ragones, product line manager at Nvidia.

It wasn't clear when the AspireRevo would be released, but Ragones said ultra-small desktops built around the Ion platform would ship in the current quarter, to be followed by Ion-based netbooks in the third quarter of 2009.

"We think 2009 is going to be the year of the small desktop PC," he said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday. Prices for the AspireRevo were also unavailable, but Ragones alluded to the first Ion-based nettops selling for under $300. He said systems pairing Intel's Atom processor with the Ion platform would generally be priced at between $50 to $100 more than equivalent Atom-based products featuring an Intel graphics chipset.

Calling Intel's Atom chip "fundamentally a great CPU," Ragones said more than 40 designs for netbooks and nettops that pair the Atom with Ion were in the pipeline for 2009.

Meanwhile, the recent escalation of a cross-license legal dispute between Nvidia and Intel "impacts future-looking products" and not Ion, according to Ragones.