Technofart

Samsung have just announced the coming July release of their first (and one of the first ever) Nvidia ION powered netbooks: the Nvidia ION is a motherboard

motherboard such that they can get an Intel Atom processor AND their own 9400M GPU on board, which is the same GPU used in Apple’s Macbook Pros. This will allow small, cheap, compact netbooks to do what everyone expects small, cheap, compact netbooks to suck at: heavy-duty graphics. Nvidia is actually claiming that netbooks equipped with the Ion system are capable of being full-on gaming and HD video machines that are so powerful they might as well be called laptops:

“The Netbook term was created by Intel to define a segment offering a limited experience, but with Ion you don’t have those same limitations. These systems can handle mainstream gaming, HD video, and new GPU-powered applications. You might as well call them notebooks, because that’s what they are.”
–Rene Haas, general manager of notebook products at Nvidia

Specifically, Nvidia says the Ion has:

• Premium DirectX 10 graphics with advanced digital display connectivity
• Full 1080p HD video with true-fidelity 7.1 audio
• NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology to accelerate the most demanding applications, vastly improving your PC’s ability to work with visual content such as video encoding
• Premium Windows experience with Windows Vista and Windows 7

The Samsung N510 will also have a 160GB hard disk drive, 1GB of memory, Wi-Fi (draft-n), Bluetooth, and a Webcam. It’s expected to be released sometime in July of this year (so VERY soon then, as it’s June 30th right now as I write this).

Additional Resources and Further Reading

Official Nvidia site for the ION system