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.