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With Intel’s new Atom Pine Trail platform integrating the GPU to fight the likes of NVIDIA’s Ion, which marries the previous generation of Atom CPUs with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU, the whole future of the Ion platform has been in question. Depressingly, NVIDIA didn’t even make a peep about their plans for ION at last week’s CES, but now new details about what they might have planned has come thanks to Pierre at Blogee,
According to Pierre, the new Asus Eee PC ET2010PNT shows the first hint of the technology that will form Ion 2. The ET2010PNT is an attractively designed 20-inch, HD-capable, multitouch nettop, powered by the new Intel Pine Trail D510 processor. It looks good, but nettops are all more or less equivalent, so nothing to get too excited about here… except according to Pierre, the graphics of the ET2010PNT will be pushed by NVIDIA’s GeForce G310 graphics… and branded as Ion 2.
That’s an interesting revelation. If true, it means that Ion 2, as expected, will be a discrete graphics solution, as opposed to the integrated solution of the previous Ion platform. More interestingly, it looks like we’ve seen the last of NVIDIA’s venerable GeForce 9400M GPU in favor of the G310 graphics card… which could spell problems, since the G310 (at 589MHz and 16-cores) is much less efficient than the 9400M from a power perspective. Still, on a nettop, that should prove an acceptable trade-off for superior graphics… but we hope NVIDIA tweaks the G310M when Ion 2 comes to netbook.
