Written by Damien Triolet
Published on June 14, 2009

URL: http://www.behardware.com/news/lire/14-06-2009/#10279

At Computex ECS were showing one of the very first prototypes of a nettop based on Pineview, the successor to the current Atom. Pineview will be a dualcore Atom CPU with built-in northbridge, which will surround the graphics core. The graphics core will still be a GMA950, an identical core to that currently used with the 945 Gx chipset.

Pineview nettops from ECS.

Pineview will of course present a significant problem for NVIDIA’s Ion platform that will lose its advantage in terms of compactness and energy consumption. It should still have better 3D performance and video play if Intel has not revised its graphics core for this. Several manufacturers admitted that they were waiting to evaluate the capacities of Pineview before planning on using NVIDIA’s built-in Ion chipset. The idea being not to rub up Intel the wrong way for nothing if Pineview corrects the gaps in the current platform quickly.

Thus at ECS, many nettops use the built-in NVIDIA chipset, called the GeForce 9300 in some cases and Ion in the most recent, while the netbooks on display all use Intel’s 945GSE architecture. The manufacturer didn’t want to talk about why it has made these choices, but obviously financial pressure from Intel counts for a lot.


An integrated system in the screen based on Ion.

An original mod, as the system, based on Ion again, is hidden in a false vase made of porcelain.