Acer Hornet, the first Nvidia Ion based Atom desktop should be available in late April or early May. Nvidia is still trying to coordinate some smart launch and create good buying momentum since Acer is not that well known for being capable of such a thing.
The platform will make a lot of noise, it will be benchmarked soon and
hopefully it should be available shortly after the launch.
The announcement two weeks ago was pure paper launch and
both Nvidia and Acer know that, but Nvidia tries to win more hearts with a
brave example from Acer. We dislike the fact that Hornet is based on the Atom 230,
a single-core CPU, as for a small desktop you might want to get at least
two cores.
For Nvidia’s sake, we can only hope that others will follow this
example as Intel already has a chipset that can play 720P HD video, but when it
comes to gaming, Intel simply doesn’t have any chance there, while Ion could have enough muscle for casual gamers and some undemanding games.