We saw plenty of systems taking advantage NVIDIA's new ION 2 platform at Computex back in June, but - despite looking promising on paper - things have been quite quiet since then.
Fortunately for those of you who are waiting, ASUS is finally getting ready to release some PCs based on the new chips. A nettop and a netbook have been spotted that not only sport the revised graphics core, but include Optimus graphics-switching tech for even-lower power-consumption.
ION: Part Deux
The Eee 1015PN, as reported by Netbook Planet, will be a 10.1in netbook featuring an N475 CPU and 1GB DDR3. Unfortunately, the screen seems to be limited to a netbook-standard 1,024x600px resolution, which is less than we'd expect from an ION-powered system. Hopefully the sacrifice will manage to keep prices down, though. The GPU will have 512MB dedicated video-ram, but we're guessing it will be the reduced, eight-core version of the GPU.
French site blogeee has also managed to uncover news of a new Eee nettop called the EB1501P. The system is expected to feature a dual-core Atom D525, 2GB DDR3 and the full, 16-core ION GPU. These specs make the system look a lot like a headless Eee 1215N netbook, which has been floating around for pre-order on Amazon for some time.
The caveat of the original ION chipset was that it sacrificed the exceptional battery-life that made netbooks so appealing for the promise of occasional graphics acceleration.
The new platform should redress this balance, though, with its support for the latest Intel Atom CPUs and NVIDIA's own Optimus technology - the latter of which ensures the GeForce-based GPU is called upon only when needed.
The best of both worlds, it seems, but the fact that ION 2 is a three-chip solution - compared to the original two-chip design - may mean that it can't quite live up to the promise of what Optimus can achieve.
Unfortunately we're not sure when either of aforementioned ASUS systems will hit the UK market. The 1015PN is beginning to surface at some European retailers, so we expect it to pop up on this side of the channel quite soon. As for the EB1501P, Electric Pig has confirmed with ASUS that it will be released here early in the fourth quarter of the year priced at £379.
