Aleutia Nvidia Alliance: The GPU is the New CPU
I'm excited to finally announce that Aleutia has been selected along with Acer as an Nvidia Ion release partner. As Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huan said on May 8th, "Ion has forever changed what consumers can expect from the mainstream PC. Even affordable and small PCs can be wonderful and deliver the full PC experience." Aleutia couldn't agree more. The PC industry is so modular that most hardware makers live a miserable, profit-free existence, whilst Intel (and to a lesser extent Microsoft) capture the vast majority of profits (and enjoy far more powerful brand value than the expendable builders who use them). Only Apple, with its integrated OS, manages to avoid modularity and achieve acceptable profits.
I've always argued that Intel (and thus the PC industry) overshoots most customer needs and I presented this at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference in '08 (slides here). Many people just wanted to word process and browse the web and so we produced the E2 which offered the performance of a 4 year old computer but in a much smaller case and with much lower power consumption, which meant it could be used in rural Africa and so open up new markets.
However, the web itself has changed and flash-heavy services like YouTube and BBC iPlayer demand more processing power. So we released systems based on the Intel Atom, itself a rebranded Centrino processor from a few years ago. Good for web browsing but unable to play the media that increasingly faster broadband speeds deliver, such as YouTube HD and Vimeo.
Graphics cards have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the last few years and their consumer focus has driven costs down massively. The premise of the Ion is to marry an entry level low power CPU (the Atom) with a really decent GPU. These always use less power and are frequently passively cooled. And so you get something that offers "good enough" general computing for the masses with outstanding media playback, which is more and more what users demand.
Aleutia's focus on fanless, low power computers has made us a natural candidate to be an Nvidia Ion launch partner and we're proud to announce the release of 3 new Ion-based PCs which will be released on the 18th, the same day that Acer releases its single core Revo. Exciting times for everyone at Aleutia!