After an initial burst of enthusiasm and despite NVIDIA's repeated attempts to show me the light, I'm no longer particularly clear on the case for ION in netbooks—who are all of these people who are playing WoW and watching HD movies on their 1024x600 netbooks? Isn't "netbook performance" an oxymoron? Nonetheless, whatever the case is, it just got stronger with the announcement of ION 2.

ION 2 is pretty much what you'd expect given the Optimus announcement from early last month: an NVIDIA discrete GPU plus Intel's Pine Trail mobile platform. There are, however, a few twists on the idea that are specific to the netbook. First, let's take a look at the overall platform.