Feature Articles

NVIDIA's Ion 'Cannon' Lock and Loaded!

By Vincent Chang - 3 Feb 2009

Conclusion

Conclusion

We have now officially held the NVIDIA Ion engineering sample in our hands. It fits nicely in our palm, weighs less than some external hard drives and it has more I/O ports than we need. It also looks like we could have assembled it in our lab. But that's besides the point. What's important here is that as a demonstration of the potential of a new platform, NVIDIA has succeeded.

Having a PC capable of playing HD videos and some of the latest games (albeit at lower settings) and best of all, in that small form factor is a coup. Apple may make prettier products of that size like the Mac Mini but this rough looking micro machine will blow it away without breaking a sweat. Instantly, NVIDIA has managed to convince us that its platform is currently superior to any Intel integrated solution it has for such a market segment. After all, even the Intel G45 did not look any faster when compared to the Ion in certain games and that was with a far better desktop processor too. Need we say more about the Intel GMA 950 graphics found in Atom machines currently?

It's only a prototype but already this reference system has showed itself to be extremely capable while maintaining an enviously small form factor.

Although its CUDA capability will probably not be that useful or significant at the moment (especially not with just 16 processors), it is after all an additional feature that comes practically without any extra cost. It will come in handy the day that companies try writing their applications for GPU computing and with OpenCL a proper standard now, this future may not be that far off. In short, it's gravy that's not very important yet.

What gives us some pause is the power consumption. As you should know, our experience with the Ion is not indicative of its actual performance when (and if) it gets implemented by vendors. The engineering sample uses a slightly more powerful CPU, a fast hard drive and DDR3 memory, not all of which will be the components of choice for vendors looking to maintain a balance between performance and battery life (and in some cases leaning towards the battery life). Hence, we have no precise idea until we get a properly implemented Ion product showing how it would perform on this aspect. Temperatures of the chipset too could vary from implementation and hopefully be lower than what we have seen of the GPU (or at least not any higher).

However, the potential of this platform goes beyond the portable arena. As a media center, it may not be the most powerful of machines but the ability to play Full HD videos is a big plus. Not to mention that like the GeForce 9300 mGPU, it will have full support for 24-bit 8-channel LPCM uncompressed audio through HDMI. We bet there must be quite a few vendors and enthusiasts salivating at the prospects of making a mini, portable media center from this platform. Low power, low noise and that tiny form factor make it a potential big hit for this segment.

NVIDIA has clearly made a compelling case for this platform. Amidst rumors that Intel would not be too happy to see NVIDIA competing with its integrated GPU chipset that's dominant on the Intel Atom platform, the fate of the Ion is probably dependent on whether NVIDIA has managed to impress the vendors to make the switch. So far, we're sold. Here's to hoping that we'll see a product based on the Ion platform coming to our lab very soon.

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