I am not too sure how I feel about this. If you need something low power and tiny, Acer’s new AspireRevo computer fits the bill.
But a couple of concerns come to mind:
- At $400 (just guessing at this stage) a low-end mATX minitower PC will run about the same price. But the minitower has room for more drives, memory and can take as much GPU power as you care to feed it. Plus it comes with accessories.
- As an HTPC is skimps on storage. External or network storage defeats the power savings to a degree.
- I am pretty sure the cheapest Core based Celeron will pummel the Atom. Maybe this will change as GPGPU use becomes common and the 9400m at the centre of Ion gets a chance to flex its muscles – but that is all vapor until something ships.
Nvidia’s April Fool’s press release mentioned running Photoshop on Ion. GPU power supporting Atom for heavy lifting is cool, but unless they are working on postage stamp sized images, I see memory (and the scarcity of RAM in these net-tops and netbooks) as the key limiting factor.
This would make a lot more sense in a netbook. Has Intel got Acer scared to release one?
