Third parties provide high-definition video on netbooks

But Intel believes Nvidia solution is "overkill".
Intel comes early in the New Year with a new version of the Atom processor, which certainly will give mini-notebook, also known as netbooks, better battery life, but only a careful performance increase.

This opens the market for other chip suppliers like Broadcom and Nvidia, which now makes it possible for netbook providers to offer machines with enough performance to play the film with full HD resolution (1080p), by providing hardware acceleration for playback of H. 264-video.

Broadcom announced as late as Monday this week that the company's Crystal HD technology is available for Intel's new generation of the Atom platform, the piece called BCM70015 Crystal HD. The chip will provide hardware accelerated playback of a variety of video formats with both standard and high resolution. Including H.264/AVC, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV9, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid, and AVS. It is already clear that the suppliers as Asus, Dell and Samsung will equip some models with this piece, which will work with both Windows and Linux.
Also Nvidia Ion solution offers hardware accelerated playback of 1080p video on netbooks, but unlike the Broadcom chip, the Ion a complete graphics processor, which thus has the functionality that overlaps with parts of what is already built into the Atom processor. Graphics performance can though prove to be a lot higher than the Atom can deliver.

  In an interview with this Laptop.com says Anil Nanduri, director of the netbook-marketing at Intel, the Ion is "overkill" and too expensive for this type of machinery.

- To run the media you do not need a big graphics chip, "said Nanduri and believes there are more innovative ways to achieve the multimedia features that will continue to deliver lower power and longer battery life. Broadcom solution is among these.

- Netbooks are not meant for gaming. You may well run online games with existing solutions. We believe Ion adds unnecessary costs and other properties make it less attractive, "said Nanduri.

In light of the ongoing hostilities between Intel and Nvidia are not these statements surprising. At the same time would not Intel that mini-PCs will be so powerful that customers choose such machines in place of regular notebook. In this case, had offered to Intel Atom processors with higher performance than today.