Due to Intel licensing schema, and moreover the desire for Intel to close chipset market to nVidia, Ion 2 could no more integrate the chipset, so it’s only a graphic processor with same 8 or 16 Scalar Processors, interfaced by PCI-Express (1 to 4 lane, 250MB/s to 1GB/s) with new Intel CPU. It is accompanied with dedicated video memory, DDR2 or DDR3, up to 512MB.

When a graphic processor comes alone, with it’s dedicated memory, communicating with a PCI-Express bus, it’s just called a graphic card. That’s Ion 2, a dedicated graphic card extension. No more an integrated chipset with graphic processor.

Worse it have to copy it’s generated 3D images or HD video decoded images to the IGP integrated on the new Intel CPU, and it’s a huge amount of data in Full HD: 1920×1080 x 24bits x 24fps ad-minima, or 150MB/s! And interfaced on a Netbook with PCI-Express x1, theorical bandwidth of the bus will be 250MB/s, leaving nothing to exchange data

I don’t think it’s a great idea, Ion 2 is just another GeForce 8400 in disguise, too slow to really play games, too expensive and consuming too much power to be competitive with dedicated HD Video hardware decoders (that don’t do 3D), in fact this “graphic accelerator” is on the same performance-level than integrated GeForce 9400M of Mac Mini or MacBook Air/MacBook.

Probably not the expected middle-level 3D chip that everyone would have expected to be able to play on netbooks!