While I already introduced the Ion, earlier this week, I noticed something isn't fully right: the sheer size of the chipset: it is huge. With a big die area comes a high power consumption, which in this case is of about 18W. That is too far from ideal for netbooks, although it may suffice for nettops and small desktops.
The 945G series still churns up about 20W, with far lower graphics performance and no video acceleration hardware, so this is an improvement, just not a long term one.
Power consumption for netbook versions of the 945G should also be lower and it's unclear if Nvidia will be offering any variation with a more restrained power consumption.
If Nvidia wants to have a great product with the Ion, it needs to think about reducing the fabrication processes to achieve something of near the size of the Atom itself, hot and not cheap go hand in hand. That is something that AMD has had success in, with the 780G for instance. It is a smaller chipset, remarkably well architected, which allows it to run at a mere 0.94W in idle, and 11.4W in load - considerably lower than the similar performing Nvidia offering. Nvidia has to offer a memory controller but it doesn't need to be a dual-channel one for the tiny platform market. All those those things add up and if Nvidia wants to be competitive with the lower performing, less power hungry, "Poulsbo" it needs to start work on something more specific.
Either way, If Nvidia manages to open up the Atom platform to something even more useful than it is today, it will be very good for the consumer. For them, it might not be so: it's still this restrained platform, with a possibly short time-span: the single-chip "Lincroft" solution, the follow up to the current Atom, is to be introduced as soon as the second half of 2009.
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