NVIDIA’s tiny Ion platform can be found in several small and cheap systems, but still managed to deliver decent performance. Intel’s integrated graphics circuits lacks performance, which NVIDIA has used to its own advantage. The GeForce 9400M graphics circuits beats Intel’s counterparts many times over and now that the first specs of Ion 2 appears it looks like NVIDIA is going for a knock out in round one.
According to this information, Ion 2 will sport twice as many shader processors, doubling the shader count of today’s GeForce 9400M to 32 shaders, which should improve performance significantly. With the next generation of integrated processors, where the graphics circuit is found inside the CPU, it’s more than just performance that matters.
Even if Ion 2 is much faster than what you might be accustomed to with integrated solutions, it will have a hard time competing from a price point. Many systems will use processors with integrated graphics circuits, where the Ion 2 platform becomes an unnecessary cost as long as the additional performance isn’t really needed.
Ion 2 is slated for the fourth quarter 2009.
