Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Zotac are among the first companies to announce products using next-generation NVIDIA ION graphics. Nvidia claims netbooks will gain 10 times the graphics performance of standard netbooks with up to 10 hours of battery life.
NVIDIA’s new ION pairs a low power Intel Atom-powered notebook with NVIDIA graphics to deliver higher performance HD video playback, 3D graphics acceleration for games, and CUDA technology for GPU-accelerated video encoding, recording, and some other tasks.
Nvidia’s Tegra solution runs on handhelds but won’t run Windows programs. In contrast, nVidia’s ION-2 solution works with Intel’s Atom for Windows compatibility.
Intel combined the CPU and GPU on a single chip, so NVIDIA couldn’t just drop in their graphics chip. The ION-2 GPU, however, works with the integrated Atom N450 processor and fits into netbooks and mini-laptops with 10 or 12 inch screens. It will also come on a PCI Express card.
Nvidia’s Optimus technology optimizes battery life. Nvidia’s Optimus will let users manually switch graphics, but for day to day use, it automatically determines which graphics solution meets your needs.
The Acer Aspire One 532G (10-inch) and ASUS 1201PN (12-inch) are expected to be the first new ION netbooks to be introduced.
