14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the hype generated around NVIDIA's Ion could soon fade, as HABEY, a relatively unknown company, has just announced an Atom N270-powered mini PC that can handle 1080p content. The company claims that using the same Atom N270 processor and the Intel 945GSE+ICH7M chipset will enable users to take advantage of HD playback at low-power consumption. Basically, HABEY says that the BIS-6550HD is capable of doing what NVIDIA's Ion can do, but without the latter's chip.
According to HABEY, the BIS-6550HD is built using an ultra-low power HD AVC/VC-1/MPEG-2 hardware decoder, which is capable of full HD real-time decoding of H.264, VC-1 media contents at up to 40Mbps, MPEG-2 at up to 125Mbps as well as playback of Blu-ray. The solution appears to be even more energy efficient than the Ion reference design, as playing back 1080p H.264 HD content uses less than 15% of the Atom N270 CPU, while 1080p WMV HD uses even less.
Aside from that, the technical specifications of the BIS-6550HD are somewhat familiar, as they have been featured on almost every other netbook or nettop currently available on the market. Users will get the 1.6GHz Atom N270 coupled with the Intel 945GSE and ICH7M chipset, up to 2GB of DDR2 memory on a single SO-DIMM, four USB 2.0 ports, one VGA, one Gigabit Ethernet port, SD reader and two SATA II ports. In addition to that, the BIS-6550HD also brings one HDMI 1.3, one Composite Video, one S-Video and the aforementioned HD video playback support.
Unfortunately we don't have any details on pricing or availability, but when this device comes out HABEY will provide its customers with an optional wireless card and HD TV tuner. It will be interesting to see how this thing measures to NVIDIA's Ion.
