NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 3, 2009 9:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Keeping Atom in Perspective
I ran one last benchmark on Ion: SYSMark 2007.
I chose SYSMark 2007 instead of going back to an older benchmark for one reason in particular: people seem to be putting too much faith in what Atom can do. These results here are useful for two things: 1) to showcase the performance of NVIDIA’s Ion platform vs. a standard Atom + 945G, and 2) to remind everyone what sort of performance Atom provides today.
The desktop CPU in the chart above is an Intel Celeorn 430. It is a 65nm single-core Conroe based processor with 1MB of L2 cache running at 1.80GHz. This is a horribly crippled version of the Core 2 processor we all fell in love with over two years ago. A single-core Atom, what’s found in all shipping Atom notebooks/netbooks, is less than half the speed of this processor running a modern day workload.
This isn’t a slight against Atom. Intel’s Atom is an excellent processor. It’s small, extremely power efficient, cool and well architected. But it delivers the performance of a lower-end mainstream notebook from over four years ago. Keep that in mind people, especially before you go out and spend $600 or $700 on a PC based on Atom.
Intel also sees netbooks as $299 - $349 machines. At those price points, Atom delivers good enough performance. But start approaching $1000 and it starts becoming silly very fast. Spend $200 - $300 on a CPU and you’ll easily have 4 - 5x the performance of an Atom in modern tasks.
Atom’s low power consumption gives it the ability to cheaply fit into small form factors. You pay a small premium for that advantage, but let’s not forget that Atom was never designed to be a notebook/desktop replacement. And Ion doesn’t change that either.
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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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