UK Netbook Review

If you want a netbook with better grahics performance than the standard GMA ‘built-in’ graphics from Intel, then Nvidia’s Ion platform is the way to go. It integrates Nvidias 9400M graphics chip with the Atom platform to give your netbook graphics performance an extra kick, which is useful for watching high resolution video. Recently, Nvidia quietly launched a varirant of the Ion platform, called Ion LE. As far as we could tell, the only difference in ION LE (besides the lower price) was that it only supported DirectX 9 vs. the DirectX 10 capapble Nvidia Ion platform. That was no problem for Windows XP users, since XP only supports DirectX 9, but Windows 7 users want DirectX 10 support.

Nvidia has confirmed that the company is on track to start shipping a new Ion 2 chipset in 2009. There aren’t many details yet, as Nvidia is keen to still sell the current Nvidia Ion chipset. Industry sources have revealed, however that Ion 2 will be half the size of the current Ion chip, should have much faster graphics and with twice the number of shaders (32 vs. 16) than the current Ion Geforce 9400m based chip.

According to Fudzilla, there will be no ION products from netbook pioneers Asus or MSI. Fudzilla speculates that Asus and MSI would rather stay on Intel’s good side than release ION powered machines. Intel officials have made no secret of the fact that they’d rather see Intel Atom based computer ship with Intel’s integrated graphics [...]