When Nvidia’s CEO was asked about Intel’s chipset sales contribution in Q1 of financial 2010 revenue, Nvidia came up with an impressive number of $180. million. Two thirds of that or roughly 120 million was the Ion share. Well, this is correct but you need to learn the logic behind the Ion brand.
The top Nvidia guy has confirmed that Ion is also MCP79 and that some customers of his like to call this chipset Geforce 9400. So when Nvidia says 120 million came from Ion sales in this quarter, it means that all MCP79 parts sold in Q1 are included.
Half of this goes on Apple Geforce 9400 and the substantial part of it goes to other notebook manufacturers like Acer and Asus that are also buying these chips.
So Ion sales were not even remotely close to 120 million but we are sure that days of good Ion sales are going to happen in this quarter as Nvidia said that many major as well as smaller manufacturers will come up with Ion based systems in the near future. If we had to bet, we'd put our money on Computex.
The gross margin for Ion based products should be larger than the company's average, so probably higher than 30 percent which is not bad at all.