Ion 2 from NVIDIA – Possible Launch by the End of 2009

12th October, 2009 by Adina
Tags: , , ,

NVIDIA’s Ion chipset has so far been found in netbooks from Acer, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, but similar integrated chipsets like the GeForce 9400M have also been used by Apple and Dell in their notebooks. The extension of Ion 2 to CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) will open the door to customers that would normally have used the 9400M chipset instead.

According to rumors, Ion 2 will be much faster than the existing design and will have twice as many shader (effects) cores at 32 versus 16 for the present-day version. Probably built on a 40 nanometer process, Ion 2 will run with less power or in a smaller footprint as a result.

NVIDIA’s Ion 2 chipset is still due to ship before the end of 2009 and is supposed to provide a significant boost to netbooks and also to notebooks using Intel’s CULV processors as well. In addition to supporting the timeframe, the next-generation Ion will support processors other than the Atom, including the Celeron, Core 2 and Pentium processors that make up CULV as well as VIA’s competing Nano design.

Nehalem-era processors like Core i3, i5 and i7 would be excluded due to the ongoing dispute with Intel over the extent of NVIDIA’s chipset license, which doesn’t cover processors with integrated memory controllers.


  • Share/Bookmark

 

Readers Comments