Intel doesn't seem too pleased with NVIDIA's announcement last week of its Ion platform to revitalize netbook graphic performance, as the Atom manufacturer refuses to play nicely and make its processors easily available for systems built to Ion specs. Ion is an idea to build systems using Intel's Atom CPU alongside an NVIDIA graphics processor. Right now, netbooks using Atoms have Intel-made graphics chips. While they're fine for the web browsing most netbook owners do, the Intel chips are a bit underpowered to nicely handle 3D games and high definition video playback.

While Intel can't very well dictate how companies want to use its chips, it has one trump card: it's refusing to sell Atom chips by themselves, insisting system manufacturers purchase entire chipsets at once, graphics processor and all. In theory the companies could just buy and not use the extra Intel chips, but there's no way that any are about to swallow the costs from doing so. So, while at first we thought Ion would be more popular than VIA's similar Trinity platform, specifically because it intended to use the popular Atom chips, VIA now looks like it could be the winner due to the fact that it manufactures all its chips itself and won't incur this "Atom penalty" Intel is dishing out.

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