While Atom isn’t setting any performance records, it is amazingly powerful for its size and power consumption. In making Atom, Intel made sure to give it an equally impressive chipset: Poulsbo. The combination of Atom and Poulsbo unfortunately uses too much power and is too big to be used in the most attractive of devices: smart phones, relegating them to MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). MIDs aren’t terribly successful, mostly because they are bulky, plagued by terrible UIs and too expensive for what they are. In a couple of years Atom will surely find its way into smart phones thanks to Intel’s push for integration, but thanks to the Netbook segment Atom hasn’t gone unappreciated.

The mobile variant, led by Apple's MacBook range, makes a lot of sense for mid-to-high-end laptops that could do with a decent graphics card for multimedia and gaming use, but wouldn't it be even cooler if the same technology could be applied to a different end of the market - the netbook? That's precisely what we conjectured upon last week. NVIDIA reckons this makes implicit sense, too, as it is announcing, today, a new platform, dubbed ION, that marries the potent GeForce 9400M to Intel's well-received Atom processor. What that potentially means is a thin-and-light (sub-1.5kg) laptop that doesn't cost the earth but can play basic games and provide much-needed multimedia functionality.