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.
December 17th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
10x graphics? that’s about 900 3dMarks06
i think it’s an underclocked 9400M
December 17th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
something similar to a high-end card of 5 years ago perhaps?
December 17th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
whats the power consumption like?
December 17th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
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.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:21 am
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.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:39 am
According to the Japanese PCWatch article, the 945G on the Netbook is 4W and the Ion chipset from Nvidia is 14W.
December 18th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Tegra and Ion. Looks like I should buy some NVidia shares before 09…
December 18th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
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
December 19th, 2008 at 6:29 am
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
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 am
Nice, hope this finds its way into a umpc and not only into netbooks
December 20th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
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…?