Today Nvidia launched officially their next-gen ION chips. The ION 2 graphics chips are 10 times more powerful than integrated graphics and allows playback of 1080p videos. They are also more power efficiant thanks to Nvidia’s Optimus technology that powers down the ION GPU when it’s now being used and powers it up for more intensive tasks such as 3D gaming and HD video decoding.
The ION 2 is a discrete graphics chip that has dedicated memory and is attached to an Intel Atom Pine Trail processor via PCIe. It will be available in notebooks/netbooks starting in April with the Acer Aspire One 532G; more than 30 laptops in total with ION 2 chips in them are set to launch by Q2 2010.
