Nvidia Ion Platform

With the popularity of video content downloads nowadays, it’s hard not to see that there’s a demand in the market for a digital video file player. Face it, no self respecting geeks like to be confined to a puny 17-19inch monitor. Most DVD players nowadays comes with limited DIVX support, too bad that also means no MKV support, which is the popular container for most HD content to make full use of your brand new shiny plasma/LCD TV. Media Center PC seems to be the best choice but they are often bulky and an eyesore in your living room. Media player devices such as Pop Corn Hour or WD HDTV (which I’m interested in) seems to be the best choice with their mini size, HDMI Full HD capabilities.

What if you want more? You want a full blown PC, Media Player, yet in a tiny package. Enter Nvidia Ion, which basically uses the Intel Atom processor like in all those netbooks that you’ve been seeing. You’re probably screaming now that the crappy Atom processor is useless when it comes to decoding 1080p video files, that’s where “Nvidia” comes in. Instead of el-crapo Intel onboard graphics, you get Nvidia 9400m. So with a proper GPU, all the video decoding will be done through it, and at the same time you can still use it to surf the web or do whatever daily task you want with a PC. Heck look around the web for the video demo and they even show you how they play Left 4 Dead with it. For now, I leave you with this Preview from Guru3d, check out the size of that thing… sexy…