Back on CeBIT 2003, Intel's launched its Centrino platform, viewed as a savior of the whole company, which was engulfed in flames brought on by the 150W Pentium 4 CPUs with the Prescott core. When Taiwanese manufacturers saw the Centrino, three months later a new trend was launched: on Computex held in June 2003, we saw the appearance of first MoD machines: Mobile-on-Desktop. Taiwanese manufacturers saw this as a way to avoid putting half-a-kilo of copper in order to cool down the CPUs and reduce strain on the motherboard.
Best example of MoD is without any doubt, Apple: the fruity company from Cuppertino is famous for using a notebook platform for majority of its products: you can find same combination of Core 2 processor and GeForce 9400M chipset in Apple TV, Mac mini, iMac - they all share same hardware as the Mac Book and Mac Book Pro. The only difference is the addition of a GeForce 9600 discrete GPU in the more powerful and expensive parts.
The top side is reflective, but that is sadly, something that we cannot see with the Revo pictured inside a white box.
Today, Acer broke the ice and officially launched nVidia's Ion platform in a form of the AspireRevo, a compact desktop machine. Even though the Ion is a combination of the GeForce 9400M chipset and an Intel Atom processor, nVidia decided to push this solution solely under the ION brand. Even though Intel will not look nice at Acer for this move, it is obvious that Acer and ASUS, two Taiwanese giants, decided not to play by old-school rules and they are going after HP and Dell by all means necessary. ASUS turned out Intel's Classmate PC into the EEE PC and created a whole new market and it is quite obvious Acer wants to do the same. We have no information about the price, but in order to be competitive, Acer should probably target $199-249 price bracket. The system should see the retail and e-tail catalogues after Easter.
