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Personally we just want Intel and nVidia to make love chipsets not war but the impending legal battle between the two has seen an interesting side effect today...

Speaking with Digitimes nVidia president Jen-Hsun Huang has revealed the GPU giant will break ties with Intel when it comes to designing the company's next generation ION platform (pictured), unsurprisingly christened ION 2.

Instead nVidia has confirmed it will be switching allegancies to, no not AMD, but VIA and its hugely promising if low profile Nano CPU. According to Huang ION 2 is already in development and will appear before the end of 2009. Of course the exciting aspect to all this is ION provides decent graphical oomph to netbook/budget desktop chipsets adding support for things like Full HD 1080p playback - a key factor in establishing these units in a media-centric environment.

As for the Intel lawsuit itself, Huang was very matter of fact:

"The disagreement is over the fact that they don't believe we have the right to design chipsets for CPUs with integrated memory controllers, which we do," he explained. "Nvidia entered into an agreement in 2004 in order to bring platform innovations to Intel CPU based systems, and in return, Intel took a license to our rich portfolio of 3D, GPU, and other computing patents."

Sounds like one for the lawyers to get rich over to us, just hurry up and get ION/ION 2 into a Dell Mini 10 guys...

Update: It seems Digitimes has rather jumped the gun and nVidia has been in contact with us to give the following statement:

"NVIDIA's goal is to give the consumer choice to pair an ION GPU with their preferred CPU. In this vein, ION will support multiple CPUs including Intel Atom and VIA Nano."

This would be the ideal scenario for many, so let's hope all this legal bickering can be sorted out amicably soon.

Link:
via Digittimes

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