Sunday, January 3rd, 2010...8:53 am
Has Nvidia Ion 2 been Oversold?
Questions about Nvidia's Ion 2 Arise
Semiaccurate has an interesting investigative post about Nvidia’s new Ion 2 ‘chipset’. Details about a follow-up to Nvidia’s sucessful Ion graphics chip started to emerge late in the summer of 2009 and there were reports that ‘Ion 2′ would be twice as powerful as the original Ion while using even less valuable battery power.
Semiaccurate posts that the so called “next generation” NVidia ION 2 chipset is actually just a renamed desktop GPU, namely Nvidia’s G218 integrated graphics chip – albeit slightly underpowered with a few ports added on. Hardly a ‘next generation’ they claim, and hardly a ‘chipset’ as is sometimes claimed by Nvidia. The post goes on in technical detail to explain that many of Intel’s power saving progress with the Pinetrail chip will be negated by utilizing the Ion 2 graphics chip – “Nvidia to lose all the battery gains that Intel worked so hard to engineer in, and then some.”
We’re not sure yet what to make of it, but we have to agree that Intel has definitely made it difficult for Nvidia’s Ion by incorporating their own integrated graphics in the new Pinetrail package. Perhaps Nvidia and ARM can work together to create a viable fully independent competitor to Intel Atom.
2 Comments
January 16th, 2010 at 2:24 am
[...] wrote a few weeks ago about a post at Semiaccurate questioning the merits of Nvidia’s upcoming Ion 2 chip and today [...]
January 22nd, 2010 at 2:46 am
[...] DigiTimes is reporting than an Ion 2-powered Eee PC device will launch in April with a 12-inch display. We’re curious to see how this pans out, since Nvidia’s Ion 2 was originally due to launch in ‘late 2009′, but Nvidia kept very quiet about it as late as CES 2010 earlier this month. Then we learned, according to the latest rumours, that Ion 2 may be nothing more than just a re badged existing Nvidia graphics card. [...]
Leave a Reply