Hasta La Gadget!

NVIDIA obviously isn’t doing much talking about it itself just yet, but Fudzilla apparently has it on good authority that the company is indeed already hard at work on Ion 2, which promises to bring with it plenty of improvements over the already impressive Ion chipset. Chief among those is a decreased die size, “much faster graphics,” and more than twice the shaders of the original Geforce 9400M /MCP79 chipset that the current Ion is based on (which uses 16 shaders). Not many more details than that, unfortunately, but NVIDIA is supposedly looking to launch Ion 2 by the end of this year — although not before it sells plenty more Ion 1s, of course.

[Via SlashGear]

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

NVIDIA said to be prepping Ion 2 for late 2009 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

ASRock isn’t exactly the very first company we think of when it comes to innovation, but the ASUS spinoff actually has a pretty good track record of going out on a limb. The new Multibook G22, for instance, combines the dual core Atom 330 processor, NVIDIA Ion, 2GB of RAM, a feature-rich multitouch trackpad, and a widescreen 12.1-inch 1366 x 768 display. It still feels “netbook-ey” for our money, but in a good way. Other perks include a 10-in-1 card reader, big people hard drive capacities (320GB instead of the 160GB netbook max), VGA and HDMI, 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a DVD burner. It all weighs in at over 3.3 pounds without battery, and measures more than an inch thick. Yeah, those last few bullet points might throw this out of the realm of netbook contention, but at least there’s an Atom processor in here keeping things slow enough for the most basic of tasks. No word on price or availability.

Update: According to Liliputing, ASRock has made contact and states that the G22 is actually running an Intel CULV processor and chipset, instead of Atom and Ion — bad news for Ion junkies, good news for CULV lovers. A bit of a mixed bag, if you ask us.

[Thanks, Shawn]

Filed under: Laptops

ASRock Multibook G22 packs Ion, Atom 330 and a multitouch trackpad into 12-inch laptop originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

This is really more of what we’d expect out of some slightly deranged basement hacker, not a company like ECS at a major tradeshow, but we’ll take any entrants in the burgeoning “nettop in a vase” space we can get. To be serious for a moment, this is actually a pretty interesting illustration of the future afforded by small, low-power components: ECS has stuffed a full Intel Atom 230 system, including NVIDA ION graphics, 1GB of RAM, a 2.5-inch HDD and a Blu-ray drive into what looks like a family heirloom. There’s even room for a couple USB ports, Ethernet and HDMI plugs on the bottom, which keeps the main body uninterrupted other than the tray-loading drive. Basically, we’re floored.

Filed under: Desktops

ECS stuffs Atom, ION and Blu-ray into a vase for all the right reasons originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Ions have negative or positive charges, but from what we can tell from the suite of pictures captured by ION Based, the next set of ION devices will simply lack charge altogether. All these dozens of images purport to show the future of the platform, netbooks and nettops with HDMI outputs, but there’s not a single blinking LED showing signs of life. For all we know these devices could be empty shells holding only the crushed hopes and dreams of hardware engineers worldwide. The laptop pictured above is especially discouraging, showing a misaligned HDMI port peeking out of a distinctively VGA-shaped hole, partially blanked with white plastic. We want to believe in ION, but it’s going to take a little more than this.

Dozens of IONs captured showing no charge whatsoever originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 May 2009 10:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Nothing is completely official just yet, but Pocket-lint is reporting that its inside source at NVIDIA has “confirmed” that the initial batch of Ion-based netbooks will be announced at the big Computex trade show at the beginning of June, and that the first few netbooks could start shipping “as early as July.” Of course, there’s no word on any specific companies involved just yet, with the source only going so far as to say that the announcements will come from some “key players.” Acer would seem to be about as close to a sure thing as there is, however, considering that it just recently launched the first Ion-based nettop, the AspireRevo, and that it’s never passed up an opportunity to roll out yet another new nettbook in the past.

Filed under: Laptops

First Ion-based netbooks reportedly on track for June debut originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments