NVIDIA is yet to announce a partner interested in the new ultramobile platform Ion. The big (bad pun, I know) advantage of NVIDIA’s Ion platform is without a doubt the format. The entire platform, processor and chipset, is housed on a Pico-ITX motherboard, 10cm x 7.2cm. This enables extremely small systems and even makes the regular netbook platform look big and clumsy. Despite the minimal format, Ion sports considerably more power than the current ultramobile platforms, something NVIDIA was glad to show at CES.
It had an Ion system alive and running a high definition 1080p video signal. The system had a 1.6GHz Atom processor and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M chipset with integrated GeForce graphics. It is precisely that which makes the platform so powerful.
Intel’s Atom platform uses Intel’s own 945G chipset and has trouble playing 720p video content, so there is a considerably difference in performance. At HotHardware they have published a short video presentation of Ion from CES, a lot of pictures and some benchmarks.
We are still missing figures on the power consumption of the platform, something that could be the reason we haven’t seen any netbooks with NVIDIA’s platform yet.
