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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IntelUser2000 - Friday, February 6, 2009 - link
You might want to know that the version of 945 used on the Netbooks is 945GSE. It is a very low power part. It's TDP spec is only 5.5W.Don't be thinking because its 0.13u its a high power part. Chipset TDP of the 65nm 4-series mobile chipsets are higher than 0.13u 945's.
And the 2.5W Atom used on the EEEPCs, the N270s are meant for "Netbooks". The Atom 230's which are meant for "Nettops" are 4W, and 330 is a dual core version of it.
It's 4W vs. 8W.
sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Remember the whole CMOS vs. GTL bus stuff. AND, the US15 has NO SATA on it. Kinda useless for the desktop.Of course the laptop variants will pull less power than the desktop variants, but the desktop parts should be cheaper.
Btw, with Zotac set to release an Intel 9300 Wifi mini-ITX board, why bother with Ion on the desktop? The current 7100 Zotac ITX board + 430 Celeron costs around $20 more than the dual core Intel Atom board, and the chipset on it runs at the same temps, 60c (that is, I replaced mine with a Zalman blue heatsink). It also gives you a pci-e x1 slot, DVI, better graphics, two slots for ram, and the fan on the Celeron is much quieter and unlike the fan on the Intel 945 chipsets, doesn't die (check out newegg.com for reviews of people 2 months down the road).
I've tested that board and it rocks. You do give up s video and gigabit eth, but the new 9300 board will fix all that with both DVI and HDMI, and will have a x16 pci-e slot.
sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Wait, I replaced the crappy useless heatsink fan combo on the Intel board. The Zotac board went as high as 90c while playing Portal, and didn't miss a beat.sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Wait, maybe that whole no SATA thing was the GN40...Necrosaro420 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I dont get it, what is this?mobilecomputing - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
Its a graphics chipset that processes video so the main CPU doesnt have to as much cos the piddly little Atom processors cant take the heat. Not even the new ones http://news.idealo.co.uk/news/4844/intel-atom-n280...">http://news.idealo.co.uk/news/4844/inte...maller-c...Slash3 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Obviously, it is a watermelon.JTBM - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I think for Ion it would great to see Bittorrent results. For example can it run Vuze (Azeorus)?mrsmegz - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Bitorrent clients would run extremely well on this machine even if it was clocked at 800mhz. Your bottleneck here is in your internet connection. Of course you could be planning to hide one of these tiny boxes under a floor tile in a server room at work.ssj4Gogeta - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Azureus is a quite heavy application compared to other clients.