The platform will supposedly be five to ten times faster than the Atom-Pine Trail pairing

Dec 18, 2009 10:00 GMT  ·  By

Hardware developers are still trying to top each other's products and now NVIDIA is giving hints that its ION 2 platform will actually surpass Intel's Pine Trail in both speed and features. The platform can reportedly live on battery power for up to five hours and outperform systems using an Intel Atom central processing unit and Intel's Pine Trail.

NVIDIA intends for its ION 2 platform to be used in full-size and mini notebooks, netbooks, small form factor desktops and all-in-one systems. As such, the company is focusing not only on pushing the platform's capabilities as high as possible, but also on making it as energy-efficient and feature-rich as to outmaneuver competing products.

The ION 2 platform, touted as the “next-generation ION,” will support Windows 7 Home Premium and will be able to achieve running speeds between five and ten times faster compared to systems using a pairing of Intel Atom and Pine Trail. The platform is also said to support a wider range of features, such as high-definition media playback, which Pine Trail is incapable of handling, as well as 1080p Blu-ray media playback. This will likely make the ION 2 a very strong candidate for future consumer-aimed mobile computing solutions.

Pine Trail not only loses to the ION through only supporting standard definition media, but also through the fact that it is rather unsuited for gaming. On the other hand, the ION is touted as being capable of running some of today's mainstream games. In addition, Pine Trail only supports the Windows 7 Starter version, which significantly reduces the versatility and functionality of any system using it.

Besides mentioning the five-hour battery life and the overall five to ten times performance improvement, NVIDIA didn't give out any number or exact specifications. Still, what is known is that the ION will also outmatch Pine Trail's price. The company believes, however, that consumers will be more than willing to pay a little extra for the Blu-ray, HD and gaming capabilities that Pine Trail cannot offer.