The Intel Atom is an amazing little chip - sure, it is no where near the performance of a Penryn or Nehalem, but it also only draws a couple of watts of power.

The problem is that Intel has been crippling it by only making it available on motherboards based on their 945 chipset, with very limited specifications such as only one DIMM slot, and only one PCI slot. Sure, it could still do 720p video out, but it could not reliably hit 1080p - the holy grail of HTPCs.

Nvidia is now promoting its Ion platform - which is basically a 9400 series GPU in a chipset along with an Atom, promising up to ten times the graphics performance of the 945, and full 1080p playback - thus making it very useful for HTPC as well as notebook applications.