What is Nvidia Ion ?

Many of you wonder what is the Nvidia Ion and how it work , I want to share some info about the New Nvidia Ion :

Nvidia Ion is a system/motherboard platform that includes Nvidia's GeForce 9400M (MCP79) chipset, 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 as Vista-capable.  The small form factor Ion-based computers were released in the early summer of 2009, with the recommended retail price starting at $299.99. Ion systems are DirectX 10.0 and OpenGL 3.2  capable. This allows playback of full 1080p high-definition video with true-fidelity 7.1 surround sound audio output with VDPAU  or the Third Generation PureVideo HD  feature. Ion systems can also use CUDA (Nvidia's General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units technology),  as well as OpenCL. ION LE based systems share the same basic hardware as ION but lack Vista and Direct X 10 support.

Ion CPUs first Specifications

• Memory Interface: DDR3-1066 or DDR2-800
• Graphics Cores: 16
• Core/Shader Clocks: 450/1100 MHz
• Texture Fill Rate: 3.6 Billion/second
• Maximum Anti-Aliasing (AA) Sample Rate: 16x
• RAMDACs: 300 MHz
• Maximum High-Dynamic Range (HDR) Precision: 128-bit
• Maximum Analog Resolution: 2048 x 1536
• Maximum Digital Resolution: 2560 x 1600
• Graphics APIs: DirectX 10.0, OpenGL 3.2
• Full HD decode (1080i/p): Yes, with NVIDIA PureVideo or VDPAU
• Display Options: HDMI, Dual-link DVI, DP, or VGA (any 2)
• HDMI Version: 1.3 (according to the manual of the zotac ION itx-f board)
• PCI-Express 2.0: 20 lanes (1×16 and 4×1)
• SATA Drives: 6
• SATA Speed: 3 Gb/s
• RAID: 0, 1
• Networking: BASE-10/100/1000
• USB Ports: 12/2C
• PCI Slots: 5
• Audio: HDA (Azalia)

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