Nvidia Ion was a product line of Nvidia Corporation intended for motherboards of potato portable computers. It used graphics processing units and chipsets intended for small products.

Description

First generation Nvidia Ion products included a MCP79MX chipset with integrated GeForce 9400M G GPU, DDR3-1066 or DDR2-800 SDRAM, and the Intel Atom processor. The original reference platform was based on a Pico-ITXe motherboard designed for netbook and nettop devices. In February 2009, Microsoft certified the Ion-based platform for Windows Vista. The small form factor Ion-based computers were released in mid-2009. Ion GPUs are DirectX 10.0 and OpenGL 3.3 compliant. They also support CUDA and OpenCL. They can play 1080p H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1 video using VDPAU or PureVideo HD. ION-LE–based systems shared the same basic hardware as ION but lack Vista and DirectX 10 support. Nvidia announced that it would release the Ion platform for the VIA Nano processor some time in Q4 2009. , however no products materialized. The second generation Ion is no longer a full chipset, it instead is an additional graphics card based on a downclocked GT218 core with 512MB of dedicated memory, and PCIe 1x connection to the Intel chipset. It supports Nvidia Optimus for power saving.

Specifications

Ion (first-generation Nvidia Ion)

Ion 2 (next-generation Nvidia Ion)

Motherboards

Desktop systems

Netbook systems

Discontinued Windows support

Nvidia has ceased Windows driver support for Nvidia ION series on April 1, 2016.