NVIDIA announced its Ion Platform in December of 2008. At CES in early 2009, there were no machines to be seen running the Ion platform. One source claimed that Ion was too expensive to be a viable option for netbook computers. NVIDIA apparently feels that the reason the platform isn’t seeing widespread adoption in the market is the price that Intel is charging it for the Atom CPUs.
The NVIDIA Ion platform pairs an Intel Atom CPU with a NVIDIA 9400 GPU. The platform is an alternative chipset platform for low-cost netbook and nettop computers that are doing well in the market. Reuters reports that NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang calls Intel’s chip pricing unfair.
Despite the feeling by Huang that the pricing is unfair, he says that NVIDIA will not pursue antitrust action at this time. Huang says that Intel sells the Atom chip alone for $45 but within a three-chip set (Atom processor, northbridge, southbridge) sells for only $25.
Huang told Reuters, “That seems pretty unfair. We ought to be able to compete and serve that market.” Intel’s main CPU rival, AMD, made similar allegation concerning Intel using pricing and incentives to keep AMD from competing in the CPU market in Europe. AMD’s claims led to Intel being fined a record $1.45 billion by the European Commission last week.
Source: DailyTech