NVIDIA Ion 2 Officially Announced: 10x Graphics Grunt & 10hr Battery Life

NVIDIA have officially launched their next-generation Ion GPU, intended to give netbooks and nettops a graphics boost.  It comes as little surprise, given we saw Acer's Aspire One 532G netbook using the new GPU a few weeks back at MWC 2010, but the company have also announced that ASUS' 12-inch Eee PC 1201P will use the chipset, as well as more than 30 products from other companies including AOpen, AsRock, Asus, Foxconn, J&W, Pegatron, POV, Shuttle and Zotac.Video demo after the cut

They'll include all-in-ones and nettops like the Lenovo C200 and the ASUS EeeTop 2010PNT. NVIDIA Ion 2 is intended to work in collaboration with an integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics chipset; using NVIDIA's Optimus technology, different workloads can be directed to the Ion or the Intel GPU as appropriate, balancing graphics grunt with power management.

NVIDIA are still claiming ten-times the graphical performance of a regular netbook from the GeForce G210 based Ion 2, along with around 10hrs of battery life (with a 6-cell, 5,600mAh pack) thanks to Optimus' frugality.  The end result is HD- and gaming-capable netbooks, though we don't yet know what sort of price impact the Ion 2 will have; its predecessor added around $50 to the purchase price of a machine.