Ever since NVIDIA said they wanted to boost netbook performance, quite a few people have been eagerly anticipating the results of that endeavor.
This week, we’ve started to get a glimpse of what’s to come when NVIDIA pairs up their GeForce 9400M GPU chipset with Intel’s Atom CPU. Quite a few websites and publications have been allowed to release their impressions and previews of an NVIDIA Ion reference PC platform. While it’s not in a netbook form factor at this point, it does provide a good starting point as several of the sites have taken them apart and you can see just how small they are. While the systems had dual-core Intel Atom 330 CPUs, they restricted them to one core (basically like an Atom 230 running at 1.6GHz) so you can get an idea of netbook performance.
PC Perspective also did a comparison to an ASUS Eee PC 901, and the 3DMark scores of the Ion were well over 10 times faster. LAPTOP Magazine mentioned it also blew away all other ultraportables in that range, except for the ASUS N10Jc (which is running a GeForce 9300M graphics chipset).
Among the features of the platform