NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 3, 2009 9:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power Consumption
I measured power consumption of the Ion system while running my WinRAR test and honestly, it seemed pretty competitive:
| Idle Power | Load Power | |
| NVIDIA Ion Reference (Atom 330) | 20.5W | 24.8W |
| ASUS Eee Box (Atom 230) | 14.5W | 19W |
| Intel Celeron 420 Desktop | 58W | 70W |
Under load the system drew around 25W. At idle we’re looking at 20.5W. The closest numbers I could compare to were my single-core ASUS Eee Box results. The Eee Box drew 6 fewer watts at idle and under load, but it also used a single-core Atom 230.
I’d guess that identical configurations would see a 2 - 4W difference in power. NVIDIA estimates that an Ion notebook would have a 12% lower battery life than a standard Atom/945G setup. That’s probably on the conservative end of estimates but we’ll have to see what manufacturers can do with this platform once it’s out.
Final Words
It’d be silly to dislike Ion. Compared to the Atom/945G combo Ion is faster, you can play 3D games on it and you can actually watch Blu-ray movies on it. If the price is right, I’d rather have an Atom CPU paired with the GeForce 9400M than Intel’s 945G. It just makes sense.
Ion addresses one of Atom’s primary deficiencies - poor graphics performance. It can’t, however, make Atom something it’s not. It’s faster to use Photoshop on Ion than on any of the current Atom platforms, but I still don’t want to. It’s better to play games on the Ion than on a regular Atom system, but it’s not fun to. NVIDIA does get points for making the overall usage experience better and faster on Ion thanks to more memory bandwidth and a much better GPU. But then there's the issue of the rest of the hardware in the system.
NVIDIA had an Acer Aspire One setup at the CES Ion demo last month; it took over two minutes to launch Spore on that machine. Ion wasn’t going to make that any faster. The HDD Acer chose for that machine was just awful. Ion or not, OEMs are still going to be putting slow components in netbooks, limiting their usefulness. Ion is luckily versatile enough to be used in other types of systems, but without knowing what the OEMs have planned I can only speculate as to what is coming down the pipe.
The GeForce 9400M is a far better chipset than Intel’s 945G. It should be, since it’s a good four years newer. But I do wonder if we’ve taken things a little too far here. I wonder if Ion actually has too much GPU and not enough CPU? Don’t get me wrong, I like Ion; I’d like to have it over a standard 945G platform. I’m just not sure what I’d do with it. Sure it'd be faster than current Atom platforms. But the applications in which it's most noticeable, I'm not sure I'd actually use a netbook for. As a portable HTPC or other small form factor machine, perhaps. I'm very curious to see what OEMs do with this system. It sure would make for a great Apple TV.
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chizow - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Certainly getting ahead of myself a bit, but I wouldn't be shocked if Nvidia starts moving in this direction with a low-cost, decent performing fixed hardware PC gaming platform. All you'd need is slightly faster CPU and GPU, throw in a cheap GPU for dedicated PhysX.The ability to web-surf and play Blu-Ray back on a small platform is certainly interesting though. I agree they'll need to improve the aesthetics a bit on the housing, but for $200-300, the same price as a stand-alone Blu-Ray player, the Ion would certainly be a compelling option.
I think some of the road blocks would be the Blu-Ray drive itself, whether you could actually play Blu-Ray media. Relying on streaming or ripped copies would make the tech much less appealing. Also, how about outputs? Is the Ion able to output 8ch LPCM or lossless bitstreams like DTS-HD or TrueHD? Anyways, looks interesting for sure and certainly a nice alternative to Intel's gimpy Atom chipset/platform.
JimmiG - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
To be honest, I don't think a more powerful GPU would have changed the way I use my Aspire One netbook.There's no need to be able to watch blu-ray movies, because lower resolution DivX etc. looks just as good on the 8.9” screen, and you can store a lot more of it locally (the system obviously lacks an optical drive).
As for games, I might have installed a couple of games just for fun to see how awful they run. But I would quickly grow bored with them. Why play games at the lowest settings at 800x600 on a tiny screen using a mini-keyboard and at best a flimsy laptop mouse, when I've got a 22” monitor hooked up to a quad-core machine with 4850 graphics in the other room? If I was serious about playing games on the move, I would have skipped my desktop system altogether and bought a gaming notebook.
It might be somewhat useful as a HTPC. The usefulness of the EeeBox in such a setting was severely limited by the poor graphics performance. On the other hand, you could just as easily get a small, stylish u-ATX case and build something around a cheap Athlon X2 or low-end Core2 Duo/Pentium Dual Core. With a PCI-E x16 slot, you could even install a decent videocard (4830) and not only use the system to play HD video, but also play the latest games on the living room TV. The system would only be slightly larger and hardly louder, but the cost would be about the same and you'd get a much more flexible system,
cosmotic - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
How about older games with potentially playable frame rates like Quake3, Warcraft3, and maybe even UT2004?cosmotic - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I think you are confusing CODECs with compression algorithms. The CODEC you are using in these tests is Cyberlink's h.264 CODEC which is a) tightly coupled to Cyberlink's super-crappy player, and b) (and im guessing here) only available in Cyberlink's super-crappy player. This isn't unexpected considering basically every other hardware accelerated decoder works the same way. However, I really wish that hardware decoder manufactueres would realize that it would be worlds more useful to users for their chips to ship with Generic DirectShow h.264 CODECs which could be used in ANY DirectShow based program.Please Anand, tell me I'm wrong and that the Cyberlink Player is actually running off of a DirectShow CODEC which is available to any other application!!! (in which case, why are you using that crap software?)
BikeDude - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I would like to know the same thing myself. (I am certainly no Cyberlink fan -- they have a buggy codebase mixed with terrible support)Also: Is the PureVideo codec payware, or will this thing come with it bundled? (I assume PureVideo HD _is_ DirectShow)
cosmotic - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Last I checked, PureVideo is a player using it's own CODEC. I think it's up to the OEM to pay to include it with their cards and I dont think any of them do, or if they do, they include what amount to 'lite' versions of old versions. I'm guessing nVidia decided to forgo maintaining their own player and just let Cyberlink handle all that. Even their website says to buy PowerDVD instead of PureVideo if you're running vista.QChronoD - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
So the Ion won't do decoding on the graphics chip if you are playing a random .mkv through VLC???apanloco - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
That's correct. It won't.sprockkets - Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - link
I've played 720p content on a dual core atom platform with VLC, but it works only if you turn off the deblocking of h264, which kills most of what makes h264 look so nice. Forget about 1080p.xRyanCat - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
PureVideo is just marketing lingo for GPU accelerated video. All cards from 6600GT and up (I have a 6600GT, but it might apply to earlier cards) can offload a certain amount of CPU load to the GPU. With a 6600GT and an Athlon 64 3200+ (@2.5GHz) a 1080p video results in about 60%-80% constant CPU usage. Without GPU acceleration even 720p videos are unplayable. And VLC supports offsetting load to the GPU on Linux and Windows platforms. I know gXine also has the same support on Linux.I can't see why it wouldn't work.