According to a report from DigiTimes, Acer has placed orders with NVIDIA for the company’s upcoming ION 2 platform. The current NVIDIA ION platform consists of a low power Intel Atom N270 or N280 processor and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics.

It’s not entirely clear how ION 2 will work, since it’s designed to work with Intel’s upcoming Atom Pine Trail platform which will combine graphics, memory, and processor functions onto a single chip. In other words, NVIDIA won’t just be able to replace Intel’s graphics solution completely. Instead, DigiTimes suggests that NVIDIA’s ION 2 platform may work more like a discrete graphics card, allowing users to switch between integrated and dedicated graphics depending on their needs.

The ION 2 graphics chipset is also expected to be available bundled with processors from chip-maker VIA.

For its part, NVIDIA isn’t sharing any details about its next-generation ION platform for ultraportables, but the company has confirmed that it has something new in the works. Hopefully I’ll get more details at CES in January.

Acer doesn’t currently offer a laptop with current generation NVIDIA ION graphics. Asus, Lenovo, HP, and Samsung do. But Acer was one of the first companies to launch a desktop equipped with NVIDIA ION graphics.

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4 replies on “Acer reportedly planning a laptop with NVIDIA ION 2”

  1. Now lets just hope acer and nvidia makes them GPUs switchable. If the new ION is essentially going to be a discrete GPU why not let the user turn it off when he/she doesn’t need it.

  2. Umm, don’t we know A LOT more about this platform than the information in the article. For instance, ASUS isn’t CURRENTLY shipping any products… Until Jan 15th when they ship the 1201n. Then there is the issue of the ION2. This has to be some sort of descrete solution because it’s been announced that the platform will support CULV, Atom, and Via’s upcoming Nanos. It’s also been published that ION 2 will have double the stream processors (32, up from 16), but that’s nothing I’ve heard from Nvidia itself… I mean ION is just a 9400M graphics chip bolted onto the atom chipset, it’s not like it’s going to be rocket science to unbolt it and let it be used on other platforms.

  3. Straight into their next line of nettops. I would be surprised if they dropped it into a netbook with pine trail.

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