Intel decided not to embrace the holiday spirit this year when it comes to Nvidia as the company has issued a statement with regards to Nvidia's Ion platform and the usage of Atom processors and the short of it is that Intel has no intention of selling its Atom processors without an adjoining Intel chipset.

This is a smack in the face for Nvidia, who was hoping to be able to pair up Intel's Atom processor with its own Geforce 9400M chipset to create some rather powerful nettop computers. We can't help but feel a little bit sorry for Nvidia, as after all it's Christmas and Intel could at least have waited until after the holiday's to break the bad news to Nvidia.

Intel has no plans to validate the MCP79 chipset from Nvidia for use with the Atom processor, although this doesn't meant that it won't work, it just means that there will be a space Intel 945G-series chipset which needs to find a home somewhere. Considering that this is an old a defunct chipset, we can't see anyone being too excited about the idea of buying a kit from Intel to just discard the chipset in favor of the Nvidia solution, at least not unless Nvidia is footing the bill for the extra Intel chipset.

We have a feeling Nvidia is going to have to go back to VIA and beg them for forgiveness for dumping them a little while ago, and maybe we'll see an MCP79/VIA Nano system in the future. We wouldn't hold our breath, but Nvidia really needs to find some new markets into which it can sell its products before they lose too much ground in the chipset market.

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