When news first began to find its way out about the NVIDIA Ion platform, it was very obvious that NVIDIA was looking for anyone that would listen. The company was desperately telling the world that their chipset and in-house designed platform solution was the perfect mixture of performance and power consumption for that new breed of computer known as the netbook.

The product that NVIDIA is pimping is actually nothing new: it is really the GeForce 9300M mobility chipset that we have seen in the Apple MacBook computers and the desktop variant can be found on various Intel Core 2 motherboards. Paired with this chipset is an Intel Atom processor core that allows Ion to consume miniscule amounts of power with modest base computing power. Currently now Atom platform uses any chipset other than the Intel 945 chipset (or equivalent) and NVIDIA is trying to market its way into what is essentially a closed platform.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=659