Introduction

NVIDIA made many of us sit up and take notice of the hardware acceleration of HD video in netbooks and nettops back in 2009 at CES when the company showed off its first ION chip. The device took a while to come to market, but it eventually did and was welcomed by those looking for better HD video performance and graphics in small netbooks and nettops.

NVIDIA is now unveiling the successor to the original ION platform; this referred to as Next-Generation ION by NVIDIA, but often called ION 2 in the media. So far the only product to have been unveiled using the platform is the Acer Aspire One 532G. NVIDIA is betting big on the new platform and sees a huge market for netbooks moving forward, especially those that use quality graphics like ION.

Like the original platform, next-generation ION is aimed at netbook users who are media savvy, demanding things like full internet with Flash, HD video, 3D gaming and premium Windows experience. NVIDIA makes some bold claims that the new ION netbooks will offer 10x the performance and ten hours of battery life compared to other platforms.