The great Fudzilla is reporting that the successor to the acclaimed ION netbook/nettop chipset will launch by the end of the year.

“Nvidia’s chipset boss has confirmed that the company is on track to start shipping its Ion 2 chipset in 2009. He didn’t go into details telling about any specific designs as this depends on the customers,” he writes.

We last heard word on the ION 2 in July when it was rumored that the chipset would be doubling shader performance over current ION products. It is still believed that the product will undergo a die shrink and take the shader count up to 32, making for an overall improvement in both thermals and performance.

In June it was revealed that NVIDIA and Adobe were working together to bake GPU acceleration into Adobe’s Flash for ION-based netbooks. The official debut of these efforts wasn’t until October 5, but a working example was recently posted to YouTube.

The demo has since been taken offline (being a leak and all), but the GPU acceleration permitted an ION netbook to smoothly decode a 720p Flash video without issue. In comparison, an Atom-based netbook with no GPU Flash acceleration frequently stuttered when performing the same task.

GPU offloading for Flash content is the next stage of the industry’s H.264 decoding movement which began years ago. While GPUs–even integrated ones–have offered H.264/MPEG-4 acceleration for some time, Flash could not be accelerated as its implementation of H.264 was unrecognized by GPUs.

It is unclear if Adobe is working with other vendors to extend this support to the desktop and non-ION GPUs.

Point of View also offers an ION 330 platform mITX motherboard. Built the HTPC you’ve always wanted.

Silicon Valley’s favorite journo Fuad Abazovic is upturning rocks in NVIDIA land to reveal details of the firm’s second-gen ION part.

Confirmed in a late February investor presentation, ION’s next generation has been shrouded in secrecy until recent whispers from insiders at big green. The rumors go that the upcoming platform, dubbed ION 2 for now, will undergo a die shrink and bump the shader count from 16 to 32+.

The modifications to the core design of the ION package should considerably boost the ION’s 3D rendering process… Or trigger a deluge of crummy CUDA apps.

That said, ION’s already robust performance will need a sharp kick in the pants if it hopes to contend with Intel’s Pine Trail platform which we prattled on about in June.

The USB cord is very short, but this is all you need to do to charge the Ion

Traveling with a power-hungry mobile device can be a nerve wracking experience. Even practicing conservative power usage by powering down during non-use times, reducing screen brightness, or switching off unnecessary services, you can still find yourself running dangerously low on power during a time when you may need your mobile device most. Depending on where you’re going, chances to charge may be few and far between.

I’ll use my own experience of covering a trade show with my T-Mobile G1. The G1 is a very capable device, but it uses quite a bit of power if you have it going full-bore all the time. I flew from Detroit to Denver, and then from Denver to LA. While in the air, I had my phone in airplane mode, and combined time on the ground at airports was about five hours. Once I got to LAX, I had to coordinate with another friend to arrange pickup, and my phone was starting to get a bit low. It’s a good thing, then, that I had a fully charged FSP Ion with me.

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NVIDIA Corporation yesterday revealed a complete ecosystem of 21 products based on Ion, a platform that has received considerable discussion since its announcement on December 17.

The list of products come from manufacturers both known and unknown to service a variety of roles including netbooks and motherboards.

Centered on the GeForce 9400M chipset, NVIDIA created the Ion to shrink the footprint of a netbook motherboard to the size of your palm. The firm contends that Ion will reduce both size and complexity by providing an elegant single-chip solution that should prove less expensive than competing products.

NVIDIA VP of World Wide Sales Rene Haas said in December that the Intel Atom, for which the ION is designed, is “actually a very good processor,” but it has been hamstrung by outdated Intel chipsets.

Icrontic briefly touched upon the Ion’s design as compared to upcoming Intel Atom platforms in our “A look at Intel’s 2009 mobile strategy” article.

Netbook chipset designs from NVIDIA & Intel

For a complete list of Ion-based products, click the jump.

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Packaged in the swank mini-ITX form-factor, these boards rock WiFi, DDR2, an Atom and NVIDIA’s sweet ION platform.

Acer’s NVIDIA ION-based Aspire Revo system pricing has leaked. Media center anyone?

On the heels of a March 18 DigiTimes report which supposed that NVIDIA (NASDAQGS: NVDA) was in negotiations to acquire VIA Technologies (TAI: 2388.TW), it has been announced today that NVIDIA has moved ahead with the rumored acquisition plans to assume ownership of VIA.

For VIA, an acquisition from one company or another has seemed inevitable. VIA was once a strong contender in the IT world with critically-important chipsets such as the KT266A or KT333. Eight years on, the firm has lost much of its relevance and faltered in providing serious competition to Intel’s chipset business. A confluence of critical missteps substantially damaged the company’s market share in both the Pentium 4 and AMD segments, leaving Intel to capture the sum of the former and NVIDIA the vast majority of the latter. Today VIA’s flagging chipset division exists only to produce parts for its marginally popular Nano products.

These losses have had a significant impact on VIA’s revenues. In 2008, VIA was reporting sales revenues of $241.6 million–less than a quarter of the company’s net revenue of $1 billion just 5 years ago. VIA’s own EPIA product line — including its Nano chip — have evolved in both presentation and architecture, and the mini-ITX form factor has found some niche success, but neither effort has come close to restoring the company’s old profits.

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Microsoft has announced today that the NVIDIA ION platform has been certified to run Windows Vista Home Premuim through the Windows Hardware Quality Labs testing program. This certification is a stamp of approval for hardware compatibility.

Microsoft has certified the NVIDIA ION platform to ensure that upcoming ION-based PCs will deliver:
• Silky smooth 1080p high definition video including Blu-ray movies
• Exciting video game play with support for Microsoft’s DirectX 10 API
• Support for premium Windows Vista features including Aero Glass and Flip3D
• GPU acceleration for faster photo editing and video transcoding

ION-based systems combine a low-power Intel Atom processor and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU in a tiny package to allow for inexpensive, robust machines. Netbooks and desktops are expected to go on sale soon starting at $299.

Here’s a video of multitasking Windows 7 on an NVIDIA ION system.

It’s Saturday, and that means there’s a crippling dearth of interesting news as all the boffins and spinners have headed home for the week. As all goes quiet on the western front, we’ll take a step back and look at what this past week brought us. Without further ado, paste your peepers to our Saturday recap:

• Adobe’s CEO says that the firm is working closely with Apple to develop a functional Flash runtime for the iPhone. Is it true? Carefully-worded fabrication? There are arguments for both sides.
• Using the new D0 stepping, Intel is preparing to release the Core i7 975 EE. While the pricepoint for this chip approaches $ridiculous, the more important question is: What can this new stepping offer us? The good news is that it’s also being released to the Core i7 920 very shortly.
• Microsoft announced that there will be six separate editions of Windows 7. Thankfully only two of those editions are primed for OEM/retail focus.
• Cox Communications, one of the US’ largest cable ISPs, recently announced that it planned to trial congestion management techniques in the Kansas and Arkansas markets. One of our readers reported that the congestion management may be erring into protocol blocking territory.
• Google is enabling Chrome support for extensions in the spring.
• Microsoft has put security concerns at ease by announcing that Windows 7’s UAC functionality will prompt the user when any change is made to it, regardless of the defined alert level.
• On the Netbook front, Intel has released details of an updated Atom platform capable of 720p playback. On the NVIDIA side of the coin, their robust Ion platform has moved a few steps closer to retail availability.