Acer Aspire One With nVidia Ion 2
It doesn’t seem like it’s been all that long since nVidia announced their Ion platform and started bringing the product to the market (and everyone let out a collective sigh because it meant there was finally a decent integrated mobile video chipset), but it’s been long enough that nVidia Ion 2 is getting set to come out soon.
The biggest advantages of nVidia Ion versus something like Intel’s previous solutions is of course that it has actual GPU acceleration, meaning that with Adobe adding GPU acceleration to Flash, you can actually watch full-screen Flash video on a netbook, even higher quality ones, as well as enjoy light gaming thanks to a little extra GPU oomph.
nVidia Ion 2 looks to continue to build upon the success the first iteration of the platform has seen, and Acer is among the first to announce that they’re going to be bringing a netbook to market that runs nVidia Ion 2.
If you recall, when we reviewed the Acer Aspire One originally, it was deemed to be a pretty damn impressive netbook. Granted, a lot has changed in netbooks since then, with everything from form factor to CPU, but Acer is hoping to recreate the success of that first Acer Aspire One with the Acer Aspire One 532g netbook, sporting the nVidia Ion 2 chipset.
Acer is looking to get about 10 hours of battery life with a 10 inch LCD, the usual array of wifi and 3g options, 2 GB of RAM, and an Intel N450 Atom, which of course features on-die GPU. Acer is claiming that to extend battery life, the Acer Aspire One 532g netbook will be capable of switching from the on-die Intel GPU to the nVidia Ion 2 GPU as needed.
It remains to be seen if the Optimus Technology, as the graphics switching is called, will truly be capable of a seamless switch or if it’ll be something akin to when Apple first brought out their MacBook Pros that featured multiple GPUs and required one to logout and log back into OS X.
Hot Hardware has more about the Acer Aspire One 532g netbook with nVidia Ion 2 as does Acer’s own wordy press release.
