We have been talking about NVIDIA's Ion since late last year when news first broke of the ultra small form factor platform. At the time, NVIDIA's tiny Atom-powered prototype system wasn't even called Ion yet, but images of the miniscule motherboard that would eventually be used in the reference platform had already surfaced and the community was buzzing with interest. One of the major concerns with most netbooks and nettops was their relatively weak integrated graphics solutions, and Ion would potentially address that concern.

Around the time when Ion was first announced, there was some scuttlebutt that Intel "disapproved" of the platform and that the company wouldn't sell OEMs Atom processors separately, without pairing them to an accompanying Intel chipset. Those rumors were soon squashed, however, because Intel does in fact sell Atom processors independent of a chipset. Although, we think it's still pretty safe to say Intel isn't exactly thrilled with Ion's existence.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of Ion though, the platform is moving closer to public availability. We took a look at NVIDIA's Ion reference system a couple of months back and in our conclusion stated that "we want one - preferably sooner than later". Well, the wait is almost over as the first publicly announced Ion design win has landed in the HotHardware labs, Acer's slick Aspire Revo...