NVIDIA ION Days Numbered?

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It would seem as though NVIDIA's ION development team may get an early, and unwanted, holiday. Currently, Intel Atom platforms use three chips to get the job done - a CPU for the number crunching, a northbridge / GPU to do all the pretty graphics and a southbridge to talk to your storage devices, whereas the NVIDIA ION platform only uses two - the CPU and the 9400M northbridge / GPU, which also handles connection to storage devices. 

Now that the N270 has come to the end of its production life, Intel's new Pine Trail Atom platform will be coming to the fore. The main difference with this setup though, is that like the ION, only two chips are required, but not quite as it was before. Now the two chips in charge of the show are the CPU / northbridge / GPU all in one jobby, and an I/O hub, similar to current southbridges. This has the positive effect of reducing power consumption, and thereby reducing heat, and also giving enhanced graphics performance, but the other side of the coin is that now that the northbridge and GPU will be residing on-die, there's not much left for NVIDIA to develop.

Engineering samples have already been sent to OEM manufacturers of netbooks, and we will be likely to see the end results within the first half of 2010, but it will be interesting to see how this new setup affects competition in the mini-ITX motherboard market.

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Fred on July 29, 2009 04:38PM And this would be why Nvidia are moving away from Atom and onto Via chips for Ion2. reply to this

tmgp on July 30, 2009 02:36PM wait until xmas... one of the major pc manufacturers will push ion :) don't worry about their holidays :) reply to this

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