"You will see us [Acer] looking at this technology much closer in our second half products," Sumit Agnihotry, vice-president of product marketing for Acer,

Lao expects other Taiwanese PC makers to throw their support behind Ion soon.

Intel GPUs pushed aside

Ion uses only Intel's Atom CPUs, But it substitutes Intel's GPU for Nvidia's own.

That could cut into sales of Intel's GPUs, , according to Jon Peddie Research, but generally has an inferior performance reputation versus GPUs from Nvidia and AMD's ATI subsidiary.