Nvidia drives in second-gen Ion
Revamped HD graphics for netbooks
Expect a raft of souped up netbooks to follow Nvidia's launch of its second-generation Ion graphics platform today.
Acer announced its Ion 2-based netbook, the Aspire One 532G, earlier this year, but it'll be joined by Asus, which today took the wraps off the 12in Eee PC 1201PN. It also launched a couple of Ion 2 nettops, all at the CeBit show.
Nvidia claimed more than 30 Ion 2-based machines - netbooks, nettops and small form-factor desktop PCs - will have appeared by the summer.
Vendors have signed up for the new Ion, Nvidia said, because of the big boost it delivers over the GPU Intel integrated into its second-generation Atom processors, codenamed 'Pineview': 15 times the performance Intel's latest netbook GPU can deliver, it claimed.
The 2G Atom line-up comprises the N450 for netbooks, and the D410 and D510 single- and dual-core parts for desktops. All three contain Intel's GMA 3150 graphics core, a tweaked version of the GMA 950 that was built into the 945GME chipset used in almost all of the first-gen Atom netbooks and nettops.
COMMENTS
yes it will run a home theatre
the outgoing ion1 platform plays blu ray discs flawlessly in the ION330HT boxes.
plug in a tv tuner at the back and windows 7 gives you sky+ style pvr,
awesome, been using one for a month :)
can't wait for ION2 it will be even faster
managed to play race driver grid on ion1 btw :)
I'd say yes
Have an Atom 330 Ion platform at the moment (for another purpose) that I've put Windows on to see how it performs. Windows experience scores were http://i47.tinypic.com/ap7a6t.png
That was with 512MB ram in it as it was all I could find lying around at the time, explaining the low score for that (and also 2D graphics). Should be more than enough for an HTPC, and the new one even more so.
The day Nvidia, MSFT and Intel killed the Netbook
For the time being there is no Optimus support in Xorg. There isn't one in sight either. It will require nvidia releasing specs (which it has not) and probably rearchitecting some major portions of the xorg infra to allow multiple drivers to be loaded at the same time and graphic primitives dispatched to the correct driver as needed.
These are netbooks that is not making my purchasing budget any time soon. In fact with Windows 7 full edition mandatory inclusion these are not likely to make any purchasing budget any time soon. It will be around 400£. Neither cheap, nor small any more.
Time to buy some more hinges for my old faithful HP NC4000. It looks like it will outlast its 5 years expected lifetime by at least a few more years.
VDPAU
The GeForce 9300M supports VDPAU, so a decent Linux distro should be one mean beast on these platforms. And provide a big saving on the cost of upgrading from Win7 Starter to Win7 HP (circa £85 it seems).
I just hope the manufacturer's ship with a well done Linux install or are swift to refund the Microsoft Tax. And ditching that Win7 baggage would allow them to get much closer the the desired price point.
Cue the MS shills.
Hmmm....
I have a Lenovo R61 laptop with Intel GM965 integrated graphics, considering the drivers seem to be the same for most Intel graphics chips and that I have a spare PCI-Express Mini slot inside (currently running a new Broadcom Crystal HD card) could I get an NVidia Ion2 in there and will Windows 7 work with it?
A question for NVidia that burns I think! I would love to retrofit real performance graphics to this three year old laptop! It would very much still rock if I could do that.
