SlashGear Japan
Notebooks using NVIDIA’s Ion graphics chipset may still be in short-supply, but that hasn’t stopped the company from developing its replacement. Ion 2 is, according to Fudzilla, expected to launch toward the end of 2009, with a shrunken die, far faster graphics and many more shaders.
Actual hard figures are difficult to come by, but the rumors circulating the industry are that Ion 2 will have more than double the shaders (aka “processors” in NVIDIA parlance) of the original Ion. Since that chip currently has 16, that would imply that the Ion 2 will get more than 32, boosting gaming performance and potentially making a difference to CUDA applications also.
NVIDIA themselves are keeping quiet on the new chipset, likely to preserve sales of the existing first-gen model. The company recently extended its Ion branding to cover all GeForce 9400M/MCP79/Ion chipsets, rather than specifically referring to those used in netbooks and nettops. Ion is capable of 1080p high-definition output and more, as you can see in this video demo of the Lenovo S12 netbook:
