NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 3, 2009 9:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Ion’s Performance: Generally Faster
I ran a couple of real world application tests on the Ion to see if it offered any tangible performance benefits outside of gaming. To my surprise, it did.
The first test was our standard Photoshop CS4 benchmark. I don’t expect anyone to want to edit photos on an Atom based machine but if you find yourself in such a predicament let’s see how the Ion performed:
NVIDIA’s Ion platform is 20% faster in our Photoshop benchmark than Intel’s standard 945G.
The next test is far more basic and very realistic: it’s a WinRAR compression test. I’m simply taking several files and compressing them using WinRAR. This is a very CPU intensive task and actually takes an annoyingly long time on any Atom based machine.
Here Ion is 15% faster than Intel’s standard Atom platform and it’s a very realistic usage scenario, even for an Atom.
While you can argue that you may not game on an Atom based machine and you wouldn’t want to edit images in Photoshop on one either, compressing files will happen and it just happens faster on Ion.
The advantage here appears to be memory bandwidth. While 945G is limited to a single DDR2-667 channel, the Ion reference platform runs DDR3-1066 yielding nearly 60% more memory bandwidth.
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stewis - Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - link
I have setup a netbook at home (Acer aspire one 150 with 1.5gb of ram) as a bittorrent server that uses uTorrent with webui.I believe the Acer uses a Atom 270 and this has more than enough power to run the client, apache, windows 7 and various other bits of software I don't want to leave running on my electricity eating monster of a desktop 24/7.
Omega215D - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
This reference system is what the Mac Mini should have been. Granted it may not look as elegant but the internals more than make up for it.mmntech - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I don't know about that. Though the Mini has a weak GMA 950 IGP, the Core 2 "Merom" is inherently faster than the Atom, even at the same clock speeds. Using the 9400M in the MacMini though would be ideal though. The Ion platform is better suited for the Apple TV. In fact, I remember hearing a rumour that Apple was considering it.Kobaljov - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
"NVIDIA sent a fully configured Ion reference box with 2GB of DDR3-1066 and a dual-core Intel Atom 330 running at 1.6GHz.""Casino Royale was encoded in H.264 and the Ion platform decoded it flawlessly. CPU utilization was high averaging between 40 - 50% on a single-core Atom machine with Hyper Threading enabled"
So, the Ion's CPU is single or dual core?
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - link
Only with the raging red rooster hatred of NVidia can a winning combination on a faster machine be dissed so pathetically.The massive bias of anand comes out in the first sentence : " It would be silly to dislike ion".
Well, since anand so fervently dislikes nvidia, he had hoped to dislike ion, but it would be silly too.
That still doesn't prevent him from using every angle he can imagine to discount the faster platform as 'no good" "not needed" " unneccessary" and on and on and on. Even "not fun" to play games on.
Oh my, when nvidia stiffs him again, and derek, and they drool out some more absolutely ridiculous bias that they would NEVER say concerning nvidia's competitor, neither one will feel any personal reason why they got hammered -again- it will be a clueless blank drooling stare immediately followed by anger and more hatred, if that were actually possible, directed at nvidia... for "being unfair" and "arrogant". lol
It's really hilarious, and sickly, too.
Kobaljov - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Ahh, I see the comment in the article about it, sorry...Crono - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
"NVIDIA called me up to its hotel room..."Dude, not on the first date!
Judguh - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
You beat me to the punch!myjio99 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Super website with a great sharing and amazing stories is ur web.. please keep doing what u do now.. thanks to you, It's a great sharing and really informative.. will keep following ur web. thanks to you and ur great website.In the gaming tests You used a GeForce 9300 motherboard and paired it up with a Celeron 430 to show what a faster CPU could get you with the same graphics used on an Ion platform. You tested with both single and dual channel DDR2-800 memory configurations here, and overclocked the 9300 to the 9400's GPU speeds.
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