NVIDIA Ion platform review roundup
By Ross Miller 
posted February 3rd 2009 2:27PM
posted February 3rd 2009 2:27PM
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Car computer here I come.
That thought crossed my mind about a week ago. That would be so awesome.
I'd rather have an upgradeable car computer. HTPC with a really low voltage CPU and SSD would be nice. Add a touch screen and it's perfect.
@RoboDan
That was my thought too. Touchscreen is a must. An intuitive on screen keyboard is must, also. Getting it working with radio stations would be fairly simple I think. Bluetooth with Skype with make for a pretty cool car phone. Make a car computer distro in Linux is the only way I could ever see this working.
And I don't see why this couldn't be upgradeable. What do you mean?
That's hawt.
This is the holy grail I've been waiting for. Give Dell a piece of this action and sign me up for a Mini 10 v2!
Please ASUS, release a 1000hei, and I just might buy it.
get the ASUS N10J,
not exactly ion, but its been out for a while, and you won't tell the difference,
plenty of videos of it running crysis on youtube
AWESOME!
I'd like a barebones nettop version... This would make a great small/quiet HTPC.
I'm interested in a quiet HTPC.
I'm torn over this. For a mini-pc yes, sign me up! But for a netbook? It defeats the purpose. Quite a few of the complaints about the more popular netbooks have to do with a) heat and b) the fan noise c) battery life. It looks like people are getting excited over just having tiny desktop replacements.. please don't confuse them with netbooks.
The newer intel chipset for the n280 atom processor hopefully will run cooler, and without the need for the fan. The atom processor itself already doesn't require a fan. Which will be a great improvement. I'm already signed up for the new EEE 1000he pre-order for just this reason. Awesome battery life/low overall power consumption, less heat generated by the northbridge, and hopfully no annoyingly/loud persistent fan.
For a netbook, a new even more power hungry 'ne HOT chipset.. doesn't excite me. But don't worry nvidia, I love you, and I'll be happy to have you in my mini-pc.
Spot on.
I don't want to watch HD content on my netbook (really, on a 10" screen, SD looks just fine), and 3D gaming is not on my list of important things either.
What I do want for my next netbook is a passive cooling system and energy efficiency above everything else, and maybe a *general* performance boost - all stuff that Ion doesn't offer, while it costs more.
On the other hand, I'd love to see an Ion-based cheap HTPC with a BluRay drive and maybe some CUDA-accelerated video encoding for DVR functionality.
Ditto. I want one of these for a mini home theatre PC supporting HD playback over HDMI, and maybe even a BluRay drive.
Even there I don't care about gaming. But at least the power usage isn't really that important.
But for netbooks, sorry no. I'd be happy to pay the extra money for the better performance, but cutting the battery life in half, e.g. from 3 hours or so to 1.5 hours off a standard 3-4 cell battery, I don't think so. I'm more interested in seeing longer battery life in future netbooks, not shorter. And these things are so space constrained they can't make the batteries any bigger...
so how much will an ion system cost ? any guesses ?
Probably about $500 USD.
VDPAU!
I'm a broken record, but I feel like piping in with VDPAU! every time I see mention of the ION - Offload all your H.264 decoding to the GPU and play full 1080p with under 5% CPU usage! This is the architecture we MythTV users have been waiting for!
I thought Intel was not gonna let this happen. I don't remember why, but they were not happy about it.
that's what search is for
I don't see what the big deal about Ion is, my netbook (Asus N10-J) has a 9300m GS and runs Crysis. It's got an Atom single core, and I can run Crysis! I do overclock it to 2.1GhZ to play games, but it still runs the game without overclocking. I understand Ion is pretty small, but it's not that new compared to what's already out there.
This would presumably run quite a bit cheaper than the N10.
Seems perfect for HTPC users as suggested by JerkyChew.
My only peeve with the Nvidia graphics cards is the absence of native HDMI audio. Does the HDMI port on the reference platform pass HD sound / bitstream through? HTPC users don't need multiple cables running from their PC to the AV receiver.
Must...resist...buying...netbook...until...summer (next time I should take the elevator).
"NVIDIA says the platform will tack on about $50 to $100 compared to similarly-spec'd 945GM/E models" So what will be the acutally price of this.
It's not a standalone product.
seems pretty sweet
Do not buy anything from nvidia till they have published their hardware programming manual!
Intel/AMD(ATI) and even VIA do so.
Well, am not too sure as to whether what you are saying is true.
For starters, I had never been a fan of Nvidia (all their cover up on the heat problems with their graphics chips). So, I went ahead with ATI's 3450 for my HTPC graphics card: Result - It doesn't accelerate decode of complex encoded H264 streams (a higher level than standard Blu-Ray streams). Tried to find open source drivers / manuals to enable the decoding (the hardware definitely supports it, but the drivers are crippled). My travails are documented here:
http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=106911
I also purchaes VIA's (S3 Graphics) Chrome 530. What to talk of a open hardware manual, even their own drivers refuse to do any acceleration when interfaced through open source software. The travails are documented here:
http://forums.s3chromezone.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=625
I searched high and low, and apparently, Nvidia graphics cards have a nice Linux development project coming along, enabling users to hack and modify the APIs to ensure playback of more number of H264 streams than possible with any other graphics card.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1037625
However, even though I don't possess a Nvidia card, once they get this product out -- read from techpowerup that there will be native HDMI audio with bitstreaming--, I will be definitely rooting for this -- provided the pricepoint for the above configuration is below $300.
A netbook version with HDMI out would be total win.
As for a nettop version, I would be interested to see if it could handle Boxee (and Netflix streaming) before thinking of it as a good HTPC setup.
it's so cute the way the USB ports stack!
All I want to know is how long before it runs XBMC?
It'll run it now. Just like any other Atom based system.
But beware, XBMC can't offload processing power to the GPU which is a real shame because this would be a perfect platform for XBMC and 1080p content if XBMC could make the GPU do some work.
XBMC is available for Windows now, if you didn't know.
"Though the company claims it'll only use 12% more power than comparative Intel 945GM/E-based solutions, PC Perspective found the test units to consume twice the wattage"
That may be true but you forgot to notice that their ion model had the n330 dual core processor and their reference model used a n270 single core processor. This makes a larger than normal difference in the power consumption.
Sure, except the netbook they were using had an actual LCD on it and the Ion platform didn't. And the ION platform still used twice the power both in idle and at full workload.
"It won't play Crysis"
Thanks god for clearing that up. That seems to be only benchmark people care about these days!
Awesome!!
Looks just like the CPU cooler from an old SUN computer I trashed at work the other day.
Where can I buy one? Or where are the details for the models available this summer?
Give it me now!
please boxee home unit pleeeeeze
I'll wait for Tegra-based systems to get truly excited...
based on this picture, it's suitable for a mini-HTPC. that said, I hope it could tackle the protected audio path issue.
Good call here... there are a few laptops which have HDMI support... but it's a guessing game at which of them support the interleaved audio part of the HDMI spec!
unless you meant protected media path... either way... HDMI support is trickier than twisting audio cables around a video signal
dis is der best render farm.
I've been putting off buying a netbook for this platform. GMA graphics suck nads.
HP needs to make a 10-12" Ion-based tablet...
and DON'T forget a passive-mode (i.e. reflective transmission) LCD
Started liking the PC Perspective review until they actually benchmarked ION with Vista and 2GB of RAM against an EEE with 1GB and XP. Good grief.