12.1” ION ASUS Eee PC 1201N - Memorial Day Sale $464 + Free Shipping
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Friday, June 18, 2010
According to Digitimes sources, NVidia has landed orders for ION 2 based chips from Acer designed to support Pine Trail processors. If it’s true that means an ION 2 Pine Trail netbook or nettop from Acer next year. The ION 2 graphics platform is said to offer more than 2x the power of the current ION platform and will include support for switchable graphics and the VIA processors.
If previous news about the ION 2 have also been true, then now is the time for it to be shipping out to manufacturers.
In any case we should be seeing some ION 2 action at CES 2010.
In other Digitimes related news, HP has ordered 2 million netbooks from Flextronics at a price well below the average price of $70 USD, at $45 per unit.
Excellent! I would consider this the 3rd gen of netbooks don’t you think? I’m going to pretend that the first Ion didn’t happen.
Really Ion 2 is kinda pointless
* Okay x2 the power but for netbooks with more or less the same CPU performance your still not going to be running the high end games on it.
* The video decoding segment is still the same again what point in buying an Ion 2 for video decoding when Ion already works.
* Switchable graphics I guess they mean systems with two GPU’s in it with one to save power, the Ion already supports this (its a GeForce 9400m the same GPU Apple uses for this feature). And more importantly why would you put a high end GPU in a netbook the whole point is small and light, low power.
* The VIA architecture is x86 based and does not in any way shape or form require an Ion 2 GPU it will work with any GPU that has a PCI-express interface. The whole idea that an Ion 2 supports Via CPU’s is ludicrous.
The only way to make such a claim a reality would be for Nvidia to design a Via chipset with an Ion 2 GPU and sell theres only but given Nvidia canning of its chipset division I wonder if that would ever happen.
In summary lots of smoke and mirrors PR fluff from Nvidia.