In what can only be described as “blatantly obvious” news, Fudzilla is reporting that NVIDIA is in fact working on a successor to the wildly popular ION chipset.  Here’s the deets:

Our industry sources have told us that the new, shrunk version of ION, probably branded as ION 2, should have much faster graphics and much more shaders. We don’t believe that the thermals will change that much, but we’ve heard that ION 2 will have more than double the number of shaders of the original Geforce 9400M /MCP79 /ION chip.

Since ION has 16 shaders , or processors as Nvidia calls them these days, you should expect that the new one has more than 32. This will get much better gaming to netbooks and nettops based on ION 2 which is definitely something you cannot say no to and at the same time Cuda applications might run faster, in case you found one that matter to you.

Apparently some people don’t find the continued increase in product specifications quite as exciting.  Quoted at The Inquirer, Jon Peddie says:

When the INQ asked graphics analyst Jon Peddie about the speculative specs, he heaved a heavy sigh and told us “”We are for better or worse trapped in the mantra of Moore’s law,” adding “We have to do more, make better, faster, and less expensive machines and components under the guise that if you build it they will come.” How very fatalistic.

Elaborating, Peddie explained “someone will see the new capabilities and say, ‘Hey, I can use that to…’ and then we get new exciting software developments. It’s an act of faith, not a consumer demand.”

It seems they have forgotten not just about future, faster netbook-based processors that will help with things like gaming on mobile machines but also the advent of more GPU-accelerated applications like Adobe software and even, you know, Windows 7?

Logic to rest of world: NVIDIA working on successor to ION chipset - Mobile 2
NVIDIA current ION platform

Either way we are looking forward to the new NVIDIA chipset as long as we get better battery life and higher performance.  They did it earlier this summer