We had an interesting chat with key people involved in Nvidia's ION project and they didn’t mind talking about the project they call “the next generation ION”.

The new ION chip is a discrete GPU like product that will interconnect with either Pinetrail-M or Pinetrail-D platform. It will be much faster, but Nvidia didn’t want to talk about any performance and specification numbers.

What they did say is that the next generation ION can support Windows 7 Home Premium, has 5+ hours battery life, can be 5 to 10 times faster than Atom with Pinetrail graphics and can play Adobe Flash in both SD and HD, while Atom can only cope with SD. Pinetrail Atom can only support the Starter version of Windows 7.

ION can play Blu-ray and 1080P and Pinetrail cannot, while with ION you can play mainstream games, or some older titles, something like Sims 3 or similar.

Overall Nvidia’s ION can offer more than any Atom platform including latest Pinetrail, but it will cost more. Nvidia answers that its customers are willing to pay the premium to the HD, Blu-ray, faster transcoding and video editing as well as some casual gaming.