We’ve been waiting a while to see NVIDIA’s Ion-based computers, and now Acer is taking the lead in this race by debuting the first Ion “nettop” since the ones shown off at CES by NVIDIA: the Acer AspireRevo. This little 7.1- x 7.1- x 1.2-inch box sports an 1.6GHz Intel Atom, up to four gigabytes of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, Four-in-one card reader, six USB sockets, Ethernet, and HDMI and VGA outputs while running Windows Vista Home Premium or Basic. It’ll be able to play any of your 1080p content, of course. There isn’t any word on when Acer will start rolling these out to consumers nor what the said consumers will be paying, but since it’s likely that other Ion-based nettops will begin to appear at large come summer, the AspireRevo will most likely be up for grabs near the end of the second quarter. I suppose it’s safe to say that the desktop equivalent to the netbook is coming.
From what I’ve read online and in magazines, the ION platform would be perfect for media PCs. Small form factor, basically noiseless, with good graphics, and good-enough CPU power.
If the TV-out works well with Linux or FreeBSD, this could replace my aging laptop as our media centre.
The HDMI output probably incorporates HDCP. Once you remove Vista and replace it with Linux or FreeBSD, the hardware probably won’t be able to process 1080p media content any longer.
Edited 2009-04-08 06:14 UTC
Hrm, well, then I guess we’d just have to replace our square 27″ CRT TV for a widescreen LCD TV with VGA input.
Could be a good excuse to convince the wife to hit the electronics store. 
Nonsense. Barely any media implement HDCP, so Linux should be able to play 1080p content just fine.
My graphics card is HDCP compatible but I can play 1080p video perfectly well on Linux.
I’m looking forward to Ion-based netbooks; a bit of basic gaming capability on a truly portable computer along with GPU video decoding!
With NVidia now having VDPAU support in Linux, and all the major media players supporting it, this “nettop” will be incredibly useful. I’ve been browsing around news sites, and the biggest complaint from people is that they think that the Atom single-core won’t be powerful enough for 1080p decoding. Of course, this is untrue. Using VDPAU, NVidia off-loads the decoding process directly to the GPU, leaving the CPU virtually untouched. On my home system with an 8800GT, I watch 1080p stuff and my CPU doesn’t go over 3-4% utilization. So, this is PERFECT for a media centre plugged into a high-def tv.
There are a few really nice media centre applications for Linux, the main two being XBMC and Boxee (boxee being based off of xbmc). I’m not completely sure about Boxee, but I know that XBMC now supports VDPAU, which is what I use, its amazing.
I heard about this on 4chan first… I feel so dirty for being there…