HardwareCentral - Nvidia Gives Ion Netbooks More Muscle

Nvidia Gives Ion Netbooks More Muscle

Topping Intel's Integrated Graphics

March 2, 2010
By Andy Patrizio

Nvidia has announced the release of the second generation of Ion, its graphics platform for Intel Atom processor-equipped netbooks and nettops. While Intel has designs on bringing Atom to multiple form factors, the new Ion is aimed squarely at the netbook market, with promises of providing the level of graphics performance usually found in a notebook.

Netbooks aren't really sold as performance machines, of course, and customers have come to accept them as lower-powered mobile devices. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), however, is promoting the new Ion as capable of running everything from high-definition YouTube videos to the game World of Warcraft.

"If you want a netbook with the horsepower to play HD video and PC games, your only choice is Ion. The new Ion netbooks deliver an unbeatable combination of performance and battery life," Drew Henry, general manager of GeForce and Ion GPUs at Nvidia, said in a statement.

Ion continues to pair an Nvidia 9400M GPU -- found in the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) MacBook and other PC notebooks -- with an Atom processor, in this case Intel's new "Pine Trail" revision. But Nvidia has reworked the design. Instead of using the Northbridge to connect to the CPU as in Ion's first release, the GPU now talks to the CPU through a PCI Express bus, which is much faster. The GPU also has its own high-speed frame buffer memory.

The result of this rearchitecting is a tenfold improvement in performance with largely the same hardware, Nvidia said.

Another important change in Ion is the addition of the Optimus graphics switching technology, which switches between the low-power Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) integrated graphics and the discrete Nvidia GPU. Nvidia claims this will allow for up to 10 hours of battery life on a netbook.

In a number of ways, the upgrade makes sense for the netbook market, analyst Jon Peddie told InternetNews.com. For one thing, he noted, the rearchitecting of the design without new hardware will enable the GPU to do more.

"It's a slight update to the 9400M, but it's more exposed so it can do more stuff. They get more performance out of it, it's a smaller part, and it runs a little cooler without the Northbridge. It's an evolutionary product," said Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

Still, the overall concept -- and specific elements like Optimus -- may be less of a must-have for netbook buyers. "To the netbook market, [Optimus] is not at all important. It's only important if you have a GPU and an [integrated graphics processor]. If someone is going to put a GPU in a netbook, that's kind of overkill," Peddie said.

Nvidia said it has 30 customers who will adopt the new Ion, including Acer and Asus, two leaders in the netbook market. Both, along with other OEMs, are expected to ship new Ion systems this summer.

Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.