Nvidia Toots Ion Horn, Release Still On Track

Nvidia today reassured all, including itself, that the Ion platform is still on its way.

Perhaps still to Intel’s chagrin, Nvidia is charging full ahead with the release of Ion. While there haven’t been any official announcements yet, Nvidia did send out a press release yesterday detailing the support that it has from the developer community, which includes Adobe, Google, Microsoft and Electronic Arts.

“New affordable and powerful PC hardware like ION is going to change the landscape of PC gaming,” said Ben Cousins, executive producer at DICE, a division of Electronic Arts. “This new mass-market target audience is a perfect match for Battlefield Heroes.”

While one wouldn’t want to venture into Photoshop with any current Intel Atom-powered netbook or nettop, the Ion’s GeForce 9400M makes it more usable with GPU acceleration.

Bryan O’Neil Hughes, product manager for Photoshop at Adobe, said: “Along with the built-in productivity features and time-saving capabilities in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended, the Nvidia Ion platform supports new hardware-accelerated functionality in the software and extends the feature set on small, low-powered systems.”

Although the majority of Nvidia’s press release was self promotional chest beating, it did  state twice that Ion-based PCs will arrive in the second quarter of 2009 from “leading PC manufacturers.” And given that the announcement was sent out as soon as it struck April -- the beginning of the second quarter -- it seems that Ion really could be on track for a release just around the corner.

Now all we need are some of those OEMs to step up with some official announcements.