Nvidia Ion opens the doors for ultra mobile gaming.

Posted on 17 December 2008, Last updated on 11 November 2019 by

Pushing netbooks even further into the laptop space (no-one can really deny that netbooks are the new consumer notebooks now) is the Nvidia Ion chipset.

It replaces the existing 945 chipset with a smaller chip and provides a big boosts to the graphics (10x is quoted) along with hardware decoding of video formats up to HD rates and digital TV out.

This is excelent news for gamers, CAD artists and people looking for Vista / Compiz eye candy.

Does this open the doors for a slew of SD-card-based games releases and re-releases. We think that there’s gold games for the new netbook crowd. TV-out is exactly whats needed too.

Don’t forget that the platform should also be usable in the bigger (7″ and above UMPCs and tablets.)

More details in an article over at Laptop Magzine.

Nvidia Goes Netbooks: Releases Ion Graphics Platform for Intel Atom.

11 Comments For This Post

  1. tsog says:

    10x graphics? that’s about 900 3dMarks06
    i think it’s an underclocked 9400M

  2. Chippy says:

    something similar to a high-end card of 5 years ago perhaps?

  3. Doubery says:

    whats the power consumption like?

  4. REMF says:

    been banging on about netbooks being useless in the future unless they got GPGPU support, glad it has happened at last.

    according to anandtech it has the same clocks as the regular 9400M chips.

    but then it is an all in one asic manufactured at .065u, so its going to be powere efficient compared to diamondville even with all that GPU power.

  5. DavidC1 says:

    Word of caution, all-in-one doesn’t necessarily mean the chipset will be power efficient. They mention similar battery life to 945G using Netbooks. The 945G used in Netbooks don’t use too much power but its a lot compared to the Atom.

    The Nvidia chipset motherboards in desktops that consumed the most power used all-in-one chipsets.

  6. DavidC1 says:

    According to the Japanese PCWatch article, the 945G on the Netbook is 4W and the Ion chipset from Nvidia is 14W.

  7. TareX says:

    Tegra and Ion. Looks like I should buy some NVidia shares before 09…

  8. tsog says:

    yep, the GPU is a 9400, which should be better than the 9300GS on the asus N10
    http://www.trustedreviews.com/pcs/news/2008/12/17/nVidia-Ion-Platform-Detailed/p1

  9. fury says:

    this 9400 is the intergrated chip which is slower then the 9400 graphic card..

    from what i can see the 9400 chipset that nvidia bring out is similar in performance or weaker then the 9300M GS in 3d

    their 3d core run at similar clock speed and with similar amount of shader..
    but the 9300m gs in n10j has it’s own 256mb memory

    while the 9400 that nvidia is talking about is shared memory

  10. maxus says:

    Nice, hope this finds its way into a umpc and not only into netbooks

  11. Yasin says:

    i got an Acer Ferrari One 200. Has 1.2Ghz AMD Dual Core (athlon x2 L310) processor, 4gb DDR2 RAM (@800Mhz), and 250GB SATA hard drive. Has M780G chipset with ATI HD3200 graphics. All for £450. Now tell me which Nvidia Ion laptop will have those kind of specs…?

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