Today’s news said that NVIDIA is going to hold on ION 2 release a bit and probably make it more powerful that expected. If you read the articles about ION 2 so far, you would know that it was expected to have 32 shader cores (uhm.. CUDA cores), which made double the original ION’s 16 cores, and also double the power in 3D, yet not enough to be useful for 3D gaming. It was supposed to be like GeForce GT 130M die shrink made on 40 nm process. BSN even published some specifications of ION 2:
- 32 Shaders
- DirectX 10.1 Compliant
- Around 600 MHz GPU clock
- Around 1200 MHz Shader clock
- 128-bit memory interface
- DDR2-800, DDR2-1066, DDR3-1066, DDR3-1333
- 12.8 – 21.3 GB/s memory bandwidth
- Around 20W TDP
That chip is expected to have like 20W TDP, and we’ve heard that NVIDIA is planing to make ION 2 even more powerful, which makes GeForce GT 240M the next possible candidate. It could be the GT 230M, which runs at slower speeds, but retains its 48 shader cores and the 128-bit memory bus while it draws less power than the 23 watts GT 240M. This core (N10P-GE) is DirectX 10.1 compatible and it supports number of features that Intel can only dream of – like CUDA, DirectX Compute, OpenCL, and PhysiX. It also supports the full decoding of H.264, VC-1, and also MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. DivX or XviD).
No need for more – even CUDA and DirectX 10.1 are enough to throw over the board any graphics card that Intel could release with Pinetrail and what’s more – those 48 shader cores can run 3D games too, even the newer ones at lower resolutions or with less details (for example Dragon Age: Origins runs perfectly at 1920×1200 on GT 240M). If NVIDIA decides to cut off a bit of the power with lowering the core and shader speed of 240M or just use the 230M, the future specifications of ION 2 could look like this:
- 48 Shader cores
- DirectX 10.1 Compliant
- Around 500 MHz GPU clock
- Around 1100 MHz Shader clock
- 128-bit memory interface
- DDR2-800, DDR2-1066, DDR3-1066, DDR3-1333
- 12.8 – 21.3 GB/s memory bandwidth
- Around 20W TDP
We can only hope to see ION 2 with such a powerful core, but it also rises the price issue – GT 240M would be more expensive, even if made from 40 nm TSMC silicone. But this is only superstition, as we don’t have a clue how much good core they get now for those chips. The main problem still lies in Intel as they wouldn’t be happy to see next Atom next to that, and more importantly – Atom would be the system’s bottleneck (which it always was anyway, but you didn’t heard it here).
UPDATE: Later same day – we just stumbled on this article in PCPop. Seems that Intel’s new graphics shows off some power compared to the 16-cores 210M. It’s all about memory performance, as even 48 shaders core will drop dead if using shared RAM.
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