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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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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