Guys, beware of the Ion 2 / Intel DMI licensing issue.
To sum it up: because of a licensing restriction, almost all PC / mobo manufacturers will likely only give the Ion 2 a single PCIe 1.0 lane (250mbit/s) for ALL of it's inbound and outbound bandwidth, a severe bottleneck. What this means to the HTPC crowd: Performance under the hood improves in all categories (if marginally) except one tiny area: Flash 10.1 video above 480p.
That's right, all Ion2 machines produced before Intel/nVidia's legal battle over licensing is settled will likely be unable to play any flash video without stutters above 480p.
Silver lining: nvidia promises an updated driver in June that works around this issue.
To those asking why Ion 2 would be running on a PCIe lane: if you recall, Intel has always connected the chipset to the CPU via the FSB (frontside bus) - Intel moved beyond FSB and now has "DMI" - and they claim that nVidia doesn't have licensing rights to operate on DMI. So the workaround is to re-route the Ion2 via PCIe 1.0 - and the PC Manuf's don't want to use more than one PCIe 1.0 lane because the other PCIe lanes are needed for onboard wifi, onboard ethernet, etc.
@anth edit: Forgot to mention that atom 330 systems are not affected by this as they use FSB, not DMI. This issue applies to Ion2s combined with the new Pine Trail Atom processors like the one powering the Shuttle xs35 (the D510).
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Guys, beware of the Ion 2 / Intel DMI licensing issue.
To sum it up: because of a licensing restriction, almost all PC / mobo manufacturers will likely only give the Ion 2 a single PCIe 1.0 lane (250mbit/s) for ALL of it's inbound and outbound bandwidth, a severe bottleneck. What this means to the HTPC crowd: Performance under the hood improves in all categories (if marginally) except one tiny area: Flash 10.1 video above 480p.
That's right, all Ion2 machines produced before Intel/nVidia's legal battle over licensing is settled will likely be unable to play any flash video without stutters above 480p.
Silver lining: nvidia promises an updated driver in June that works around this issue.
Read about it at the Anandtech review of the Zotac ion2 Zbox.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3702/zotacs-zbox-hdid11-review-next-gen-ion-better-worse-than-ion1 The first page of the review explains the DMI licensing issue and the 6th page covers the flash 10.1 issue specifically.
To those asking why Ion 2 would be running on a PCIe lane: if you recall, Intel has always connected the chipset to the CPU via the FSB (frontside bus) - Intel moved beyond FSB and now has "DMI" - and they claim that nVidia doesn't have licensing rights to operate on DMI. So the workaround is to re-route the Ion2 via PCIe 1.0 - and the PC Manuf's don't want to use more than one PCIe 1.0 lane because the other PCIe lanes are needed for onboard wifi, onboard ethernet, etc.
@anth edit: Forgot to mention that atom 330 systems are not affected by this as they use FSB, not DMI. This issue applies to Ion2s combined with the new Pine Trail Atom processors like the one powering the Shuttle xs35 (the D510).
Hope this info helps.