Based on the fairly detailed report on the german Heise IT news portal (editors of the excellent german IT magazine 'ct') directly from the CeBIT 2010, here is a brief overview of the new generation of Nvidia ION chips.
The new IONs (officially still called ION, not ION2) will be available in 3 variants, all three are purely GPUs not complete chipsets, since the Pineview Atoms already have a northbridge integrated and only offer 4 PCIe lanes for connection of external chips. All will be using a single PCIe lane, which means a maximum bandwidth of 250MB/s (roughly double the bandwidth of plain old PCI, or equivalent to first generation AGP). While this might not sound like much, it's still plenty for HTPC use.
Since these are discrete GPUs they come with dedicated graphics memory, which should improve performance compared to first generation ION.
1. variant (meant for netbooks up to 10")
8 shaders, 6 Watt TDP, support for hybrid Optimus technology
2. variant (meant for larger netbooks)
16 shaders, 13Watt TDP, (comparable to the Nvidia G210 GPU), support for hybrid Optimus technology
3. variant (for nettops)
16 shaders, support for HDMI, DVI-duallink and Displayport connections, will also be available on low-profile PCIex1 cards to upgrade existing Pineview Atom mobos (or any PC/mobo with PCIex1 slot), these cards might sell labeled as Nvidia-G210 PCIex1 too
Basically it looks like the 2nd gen. ION is equivalent to a G210, with the difference that it uses a PCIex1 connection rather than PCIex16.
This should mean full VDPAU spec. C support under Linux.
According to Nvidia over 30 different products using second generation IONs are expected to be released over the next few months.
Nvidia press release:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1267553417952.html
There is already one Pineview Atom motherboard from the Dutch company 'Point of View' available ( Point of View MB-D510-MITX ), that can be bought bundled with a low-profile PCIex1 Nvidia-G210 card, which is basically the new ION in all but the name.
Nvidia ION2 products currently available to buy:
I will be updating my Nvidia ION products overview with 2nd gen ION products as soon as they become available to buy.
This thread is for Linux specific discussion of ION2 hardware, for Windows specific discussion please see the following thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1249364
The new IONs (officially still called ION, not ION2) will be available in 3 variants, all three are purely GPUs not complete chipsets, since the Pineview Atoms already have a northbridge integrated and only offer 4 PCIe lanes for connection of external chips. All will be using a single PCIe lane, which means a maximum bandwidth of 250MB/s (roughly double the bandwidth of plain old PCI, or equivalent to first generation AGP). While this might not sound like much, it's still plenty for HTPC use.
Since these are discrete GPUs they come with dedicated graphics memory, which should improve performance compared to first generation ION.
1. variant (meant for netbooks up to 10")
8 shaders, 6 Watt TDP, support for hybrid Optimus technology
2. variant (meant for larger netbooks)
16 shaders, 13Watt TDP, (comparable to the Nvidia G210 GPU), support for hybrid Optimus technology
3. variant (for nettops)
16 shaders, support for HDMI, DVI-duallink and Displayport connections, will also be available on low-profile PCIex1 cards to upgrade existing Pineview Atom mobos (or any PC/mobo with PCIex1 slot), these cards might sell labeled as Nvidia-G210 PCIex1 too
Basically it looks like the 2nd gen. ION is equivalent to a G210, with the difference that it uses a PCIex1 connection rather than PCIex16.
This should mean full VDPAU spec. C support under Linux.
According to Nvidia over 30 different products using second generation IONs are expected to be released over the next few months.
Nvidia press release:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1267553417952.html
There is already one Pineview Atom motherboard from the Dutch company 'Point of View' available ( Point of View MB-D510-MITX ), that can be bought bundled with a low-profile PCIex1 Nvidia-G210 card, which is basically the new ION in all but the name.
Nvidia ION2 products currently available to buy:
I will be updating my Nvidia ION products overview with 2nd gen ION products as soon as they become available to buy.
This thread is for Linux specific discussion of ION2 hardware, for Windows specific discussion please see the following thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1249364