NVIDIA Announces Second-Generation ION

At the current CeBIT conference going on in Hanover, Germany, NVIDIA has unveiled its next-generation ION platform. Though it’s been called “ION 2” by the media for the past month or so, the name simply remains “ION”. What the revamped graphics processor brings is improved performance, improved battery-life and not surprisingly, support for the company’s other recently-announced technology, Optimus.

NVIDIA focuses the next-generation ION on the netbook segment heavily, but like the first-gen ION, vendors will be able to take advantage of it in nettops as well. The latest version of ION still relies on Intel’s Atom, but has been updated to take advantage of that company’s recently-launched Pine Trail-based Atom CPUs.

As Intel’s own IGP’s haven’t been all too stellar where HD playback is concerned, NVIDIA has a real winner with ION, given that it allows pretty-well all types of HD playback to be made possible. While something as simple as YouTube HD stutters on Atom alone, it plays back fine on ION. And with the Optimus technology in full effect, NVIDIA’s GPU will only be used when necessary, hence the reason for the increased battery-life.

NVIDIA has already won many design wins with the next-generation ION from companies like AOpen, ASRock, ASUS, Foxconn, Pegatron, Zotac and so forth. Judging by the press release, availability will be sometime this summer.

The new ION graphics processing unit (GPU) vastly outperforms basic netbook graphics by delivering rich HD media in games, movies, and Internet-based video. Unlike netbooks with Intel integrated graphics, ION netbooks have the power to play amazing HD video smoothly from sites like YouTube and support popular PC games like World of Warcraft. The new ION netbooks also feature NVIDIA’s highly acclaimed Optimus technology, which automatically selects the best graphics processor for running any given application – seamlessly routing the workload to either an NVIDIA discrete GPU or Intel integrated graphics. The result is great battery life and superior performance when you need it.