1. Nvidia Announces Ion 2
Nvidia launches Ion 2—the 2nd-gen of its lightweight laptop graphics chip—which will combine Optimus tech with Ion. It’s promising, but not a sure bet.
Nvidia’s release of the first Ion graphics chip met with a storm of praise from critics and consumers, who found the better performance the graphics chip gave to small laptops an endearing improvement over slow netbooks with merely good battery life. As we showed in our tests two months ago, netbooks with Ion graphics processing proved nearly as powerful as an ultraportable laptop that carried a much more powerful CPU. However, we determined that while netbooks are good, Atom was weak and Ion was was the future of the platform. Well, today Nvidia has shed some light on part of that future.
With Ion 2, Nvidia will change little with the actual processing power, instead including its Optimus technology, which seamlessly switches between integrated and discrete graphics, thus promoting battery life and general performance. With a slightly faster processing chip, there is no expectation that running graphics intensive software will be significantly better on the new netbooks featuring Ion 2. But including Optimus may boost the value proposition for an Ion 2 netbook.
Both Acer and Asus will release Ion 2 netbooks, the Aspire One 532G (available in April) and 1201PN (available summer 2010) respectively. These netbooks run on the new dual-core Pinetrail CPU from Intel. Asus and Lenovo will also release all-in-one computers with Ion 2. These are the EeeTop 2010PNT and C200, respectively.
Keep in mind that the important thing about Ion 2 is Optimus, and Optimus only. If Optimus is deemed important enough to buyers, it will make Ion 2 extremely popular. We are surprised that HP, which released the critically acclaimed Mini 311 with Ion, is not one of the first companies to jump on the Ion 2 bandwagon. This move doesn’t bode well for Nvidia. Asus, the current best-selling netbook manufacturer, is at the forefront of releasing products with both Optimus and Ion 2, as is Acer, the second-place netbook manufacturer.
We like Ion, which has potential to improve as a graphics platform. But software developers like Microsoft and Internet giants like Google need to take advantage of the 3D graphics rendering to ensure Ion’s future. Adobe already has, but its recent dispute with Apple over security flaws and Apple’s attitude against Flash is slowly steering developers to HTML5 instead. Google already has plans to make Youtube run completely on HTML5 by the year’s end, no flash necessary. Whether HTML5 will take advantage of GPU rendering is unknown. Ion’s future is partially tied to the future of Flash—that is, until we know more about HTML5.
Potential netbook owners will be more inclined to purchase a netbook with Ion 2 than a standard netbook. Nvidia states that Ion 2-powered netbooks can run for up to ten hours, which is significantly better than our tests of first-gen Ion netbooks. Preliminary reports of Ion 2 show that it performs worse than the original Ion, though we don’t know for certain that the test results are completely accurate, and will reserve judgment for our own testing. Nvidia has not spoken out against these results.
Ion 2 isn’t an exciting technology. The slight performance boost Nvidia states (According to Nvidia: 535/1230Mhz from 450/1100MHz on the 16 core version. Nvidia has not released the clock speeds of the 8-core version, which it says will be lower than the 16-core SKU to avoid overheating) is nice, but it will not have a serious impact on real world performance.
Including Optimus in the design of the new netbook graphics processor was both expected and practically required; netbooks as a category sell based on touted battery life, not touted performance and all computer makers want to promise both. Nvidia is giving them that ability. It’s a great marketing strategy, but if it’s true, then it’s great for everyone. Yet, if the claim is true, then netbooks without Ion technology may soon be extinct. Every manufacturer will have to include this graphics chip. With over 30 Ion 2 netbooks, nettops and all-in-ones expected by this summer, according to Nvidia, manufacturers are buying into it, so we’ll be sure to evaluate Ion 2-powered notebooks for ourselves (and for you) as soon as we can.
Isn't the 1201PN and the 532G running the single core N450? Hyper threaded yes, but still single core. ION2 + Atom 300 = Win
Latest netbooks are running with Intel GMA 4500 GPU which can run mmorpg and other games at decent fps. So you don't really need this exactly which make you netbook pricer and almost the same price range with your notebooks. If we are talking about desktop I think this is viable, but hello we are not.
You certainly know what we want.
Just how large is the market? Are they just flodding the market with devices in an attempt to generate revenue?
How does this fare against the on-chip graphics Intel is producing for mobile chipsets?
...and to think i was genuinely excited to see better graphics for netbooks...guess i'm asking too much
i7 & GT335M on netbook please
Latest netbooks are running with Intel GMA 4500 GPU which can run mmorpg and other games at decent fps. So you don't really need this exactly which make you netbook pricer and almost the same price range with your notebooks. If we are talking about desktop I think this is viable, but hello we are not.
The GMA 4500 still stutters at times on full 1080p content, whether or not you can get 20fps on WoW (an almost 7 year old game mind you) and think thats great is not relevant. The GMA 4500 is great for people who only type and occasionally use Hulu. The ION and ION 2 platform fill the gap and give you well rounded GPU performance.
JohnnyLucky, the market for netbooks is huge and growing.
burnley14, in our tests with GMA4500, Ion easily outperformed, getting 2-3x the scores.
redplanet_returns, better graphics will come to netbooks, but not in terms of quality, but quantity. Todya, 95% of netbooks released have no dedicated GPU. If Ion2 is successful, that number will reverse.
I'd rather a 2.5GHz 15Watt dual core, thank you (the C2D P9700 is 2.8GHz and has 6MB of cache with a TDP of 28Watts). Imagine what that C2D could do on 32nm.
How about a cherry binned 32nm dual core i5? Instead of so many of these lower wattage CPU's being low binned ones that couldn't make the cut (2.66GHz i5 and some of these LGA 1156 i7's with HT having the same wattage, for example).
I like the idea of the ION, but it needs a little more muscle yet.
If you give a full power netbook, I'd pay just as much as I would for a full powered notebook, thank you.
JohnnyLucky, the market for netbooks is huge and growing.burnley14, in our tests with GMA4500, Ion easily outperformed, getting 2-3x the scores. redplanet_returns, better graphics will come to netbooks, but not in terms of quality, but quantity. Todya, 95% of netbooks released have no dedicated GPU. If Ion2 is successful, that number will reverse.
Netbooks are not designed for 1080p thats why they are below 11" in size and rarely have DVD drives, they are suppose to be handy (like PDA). If you want decent gaming and audio video platform you can have a laptop. Suppose to be light games and light videos. They are best for travels, compared to heavier laptops. You are asking your netbook to be a laptop like performance, which is M$ and Intel doesn't like it to be.
I also have some fuzzy vision picturing just where a netbook fits in the world. Perhaps the new wave of new materials will help it to fit into a niche. Too big to be a phone, too small to be a desktop replacement.
My 8925 HTC ( HTc currently being annoyed by Apple patent suit) IS a little small to do more than check the mail box for earth shaking collapse of civilisation type email. The insanely small qwerty board is usefull for the once a month or so pinch that must be answered immediately. Otherwise it is nice to have GPS software (tomtom6) and a quick and easy emergency access to internet for annoying crap like the current price of gold, dollar to pound, or fox news for current event conversation topics. Anything more than that really requires a kicked back surfer chair to do anyway.
i built desktop dual core atom few months ago for a niece and it worked good enough. now, i am excited for first reviews of netbooks based on pinetrail.
With HTML5 any GPU acceleration would need to be done with the layout engine and/or what ever decoder it uses. From the looks of it, none of the major ones have gotten that far in the full implementation to begin with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compa [...] 28HTML5%29
Then there will probably be a protracted war over what codec will be standard (h264 or Theora or something else). It is likely we as stuck with Flash and Silverlight for a great long while.
Yay for ION2! I'm holding out til I can get a 11" (max) netbook for my general office work and Left4dead2.
Also, please can we stop calling 12" and bigger laptops netbooks?
Yay for ION2! I'm holding out til I can get a 11" (max) netbook for my general office work and Left4dead2.Also, please can we stop calling 12" and bigger laptops netbooks?
it's called the alienware m11x. you're welcome.