At Nvidia's latest conference call Jensen could not hide his optimism over the success of Ion, and he said that Steve Jobs calls the Ion chipset, also known as Geforce 9400M G, an incredible chip. Since Apple has this chip in quite few of its notebook machines, he probably has to tell some good word about its own product and its “guts”.
This might also indicated that Steve Jobs actually thinks that
Ion as a platform is “an incredible chip” which doesn’t sound right, as chip is
a chip and platform has at least two major chips, CPU and chipset.
We can only hope that Apple will embrace Ion for the sake of
Nvidia, as in bad economy times, people might
be extra careful not to upset Intel. Jensen also said before that “what Apple
wants Apple gets”, which certainly means that if Apple is a fan on Ion, they
will simply introduce it, regardless of Intel’s possible disagreement.
Ion looks like platform made in heaven for next generation toaster
shaped Mac Mini and if you look at the reference design that we pictured here,
you can get the idea that Mac Mini might come with Ion inside, but at press
time we don’t have any confirmation that this will even happen. At least you can see the resemblance here.