That NVIDIA and Intel haven’t been getting along lately isn’t big news but it looks like NVIDIA has finally gotten up from the dinner table and left the restaurant in a huff. The epicenter of the problem appears to be NVIDIA’s Ion chipset, which provides some much needed oomph to netbook and nettop platforms. Intel wants to keep a distinct separation between its low-power, low-cost Atom chips and its more-capable Pentium chips. When NVIDIA’s Ion is added to an Atom platform, the extra power makes Intel’s higher-end (and higher-cost) CPU offerings a tougher sell.

This is either a good thing or a bad thing. Actually, like most things, it’s a bit of both. Adobe’s FLV file format is the de facto standard for web video due to sharing sites like YouTube using it exclusively. Many would argue that’s a bad thing (despite the fact that it works well for most people) because it gives a single company a stranglehold over an entire province of internet content.

So when NVIDIA works with them to accelerate decoding the format, it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Better performance and integration like this will surely extend the life of, and silence performance complaints about, FLV. For now it’s a good thing, but come HTML5…

Well good morning, Interesting Netbook. You have caught my attention thanks to your inclusion of NVIDIA’s Ion chipset, 1366×768 display, 2GB of RAM, Windows 7 operating system, and longer-than-long battery life.

ASUS’ NVIDIA Ion-powered EeeBox PC has gotten sort of official. It’s on ASUS’ website now, at least, although there’s still not much in the way of pricing or availability. The specs look pretty nice, though, with a whisper-quiet setup thanks to a dual-core Atom N330 CPU, 2GB of RAM, 250GB SATA hard drive, 802.11b/g/n wireless, card reader, and, of course, the horsepower to push full 1080p video.

BFG has always been one of the go-to brands for high-end video cards and hardware, and their latest opus continues the tradition. The BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2OC is the beastliest card out there, and is easily the most powerful single-card solution out there, even beating out such dual-GPU solutions as the Radeon HD 4870 X2. That’s some serious power… must be why it costs $800.

There’s a reason why the Zune HD’s interface moves so smoothly. Powering the device is the Nvidia Tegra, which Nvidia recently described as an “an entire computer-on-a-chip,” and one with “eight separate processors, including: a GPU, two video processors, and audio processor, two ARM core processor and more.” (That “and more” bit is a bit ambiguous for my liking, but what are you gonna do?) In any event, the Zune HD looks to have some serious computational power going for it. WILL IT BE AN IPOD KILLER?

Nvidia is shopping around a design prototype running their Tegra ARM processor, a chip powerful enough to run Wind CE and power a wee keyboard and screen.

Tegra was supposed to change the way we thought about smartphones a few months ago but the chipset never took off. Sadly, this doesn’t seem like it will make any headway either.

Just when we thought the two companies had found true love, it turns out there’s some turmoil beneath the surface. After NVIDIA’s acknowledgment of mobile GPU breakdown (and denial that the faulty GPUs were in Apple products), Apple determined that many video failures in MacBooks were in fact NVIDIA’s fault.

Okay, they worked through that. But it seems NVIDIA has been taking Apple for granted, and displaying “arrogance” in its proposals for continuing a partnership. NVIDIA arrogant? Well blow me down!

Nvidia’s Tegra chip hasn’t even hit the market, but we know for fact that Tegra 2 is on its way next year. There’s no set timeframe, but we believe it will hit the market sometime during the summer or so its been hinted at. The first Tegra device to be released stateside will be the Zune HD in the fall. I’ve already seen what it can do with Windows CE on a handful of netbooks that were showcased at Computex last month and I walked away very impressed. So what can we expect from Tegra 2?

Good news for you Adobe Photoshop (and other Creative Suite applications) CS4 users who just so happen to have a high-end Nvidia GPU. Nvidia released today a bunch of plug-ins for Adobe CS4 (both PC and Mac) that leverage the power of your GPU. For example, one such plug-in, Elemental Accelerator 2.0 for Windows, taps into your Quadro GPU to help encode video faster. Encoding H.264 video with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 while using the plugin improves encoding time by 11 times. (Mac users will have to settle with Elemental Accelerator 1.2.)

We’ve been excited about Nvidia’s Tegra for as long as they’ve been showing off their prototype handsets – which, to be clear, is quite a while. They’ve managed to jam a beast of a computer down into a itty-bitty chip and sink the power requirements down to less than one watt, all while keeping the thing cheap. In other words, straight ridiculous computing power (games, HD video output) on a handset that lasts, as Nvidia puts it, “days and days”.

We’d heard whispers from Nvidia’s crew back at CES that this thing ought to make its mobile debut in Q4, but we had a hard time getting an official statement on the matter. Looks like it has become a sure thing since.

We’ve been talking about Nvidia’s Tegra on CG here and there, but not very many people know exactly what it is. Sure, it’s a tiny mobile computer, but how does it work and where did it come from? Where can we find it and why is it better than Intel’s Atom? We asked Nvidia this and more.

It seems that a lot of people are moving to a laptop as their primary machine, but that poses a problem for power users who need both mobility and horsepower. Add battery concerns to the pile and you’ve got kind of a conundrum. Fortunately, each new generation of graphics cards provides more power, less battery draw, or both. That’s going on right now with Nvidia, which is adding a bunch of confusingly-named but functional mobile GPUs to their lineup.

Deets inside. If you like cards with G’s in front of them, this is definitely a post for you.

Have you been following this Nvidia-Intel spat? Long story short: Nvidia suspects that Intel has been giving laptop manufacturers a sweet deal vis-à-vis Atom processors and Intel’s whole chipset+integrated graphics chip. This upsets Nvidia because its own laptop graphics platform, called Ion, hasn’t been able to find a way onto a laptop… until now! Yes, the Lenovo IdeaPad S12 will be the first laptop to use Nvidia’s Ion platform. It’ll be $449 when it launches next month.

Oh, man, I cannot wait to punch a boulder in 3D. (Actually, I can wait, but that’s immaterial for the purpose of this post.) In addition to the earlier Street Fighter IVannouncement, Capcom also let it be known that Resident Evil 5 will be released sometime this year. In and of itself, sorta blah. But!

The eternal quandary for system builders has been much less quandarious (to coin a term) for the last year or so. Intel processor, AMD video card — anything else would be uncivilized. AMD’s 48xx series has been the only choice for a while, but the latest products from AMD and NVIDIA are a little less starkly separated.

For around $250 (the mid-high sweet spot), the 4890 and GTX 275 are remarkably well-matched — more so than any two equivalently priced cards from the companies have been for some time. So which do you buy?

According to Thomas Ricker, things are hotting up at NVIDIA thanks to their ION platform, a netbook and nettop motherboard that will serve 1080p video in a package that fits on the palm of your hand. The first new model should be the Acer Hornet, a Wii-like gaming machine with an odd 3D remote.