Intel’s Pinetrail-M platform is now open for third party HD accelerators and Broadcom is one of the noisiest partners with this full HD support for new Atom Pinetrail platform.

We do believe that the matching Broadcom BCM70012 chip with Pinetrail-M will be a cheaper option. Broadcom describes its BCM70012 chip as an AVC/VCI/MPEG PCI express HD decoder chipset for netbook and nettops that can handle the full 1080p HD as well as Blu-ray.

Nvidia commented that despite the fact that Broadcom can solve the HD playback issue, it won't make video encoding faster, won't support GPU compute applications and most important won’t make mainstream games runs better.

The Pinetrail-M GMA 3150 graphics core won’t play HD on its own as it's too week for that, but we do believe that there will be plenty of partners embracing either Broadcom's BCM700012 or ION 2.