Future of Nvidia Ion

After the launch of Intel Pine Trail processor what will be the fate of Nvidia Ion

 Intel recently announced that its Pine Trail Atom processor for netbooks is on schedule and will be available this year. This statement has led to a series of doubts related to the future of Nvidia Ion platform. With the launch of the new Pine Trail Atom N450 processors the current netbook processors i.e. the Atom N270/Atom N280 will gradually be phased out due to the inherent advantages of the Atom N450 processor.

If the Atom N270/Atom N280 processors are phased out or their demand falls then it would really affect the sales of the Nvidia Ion platform. The Nvidia Ion platform bundles an Nvidia GPU with an Atom CPU to deliver graphics which are far superior to the integrated Intel GMA950 graphics controller found on most netbooks. On the other hand, the Pine Trail platform groups the CPU and GPU functions together on a single chip which has inherent advantages of being fast, more efficient, reduces power consumption, and also reduces the heat generated thereby, increasing the graphics performance.

It is due to the facts stated above that there is quite a lot of speculation regarding the Nvidia Ion platform. Nvidia can club its GPU with other processors like VIA and AMD. In fact, Nvidia has expressed interest to develop an Ion platform to be used alongside a VIA processor. NVIDIA also have a separate platform called Tegra, that bundles a low power ARM-based CPU with NVIDIA graphics to deliver HD video playback on devices that consume even less power than the typical Intel Atom-based netbook.

Whether Nvidia will develop the Ion platform for use with VIA and AMD based processors? Whether Intel Pine Trail processors will succeed? Whether users will actually want a netbook with higher graphics capability? All these questions still remain in our minds but, we will just have to wait and watch till a netbook with the new Pine Trail processor is launched.