Hardware Nvidia's Ion Platform

Because if the atom is too attractive then it starts eating into the market of their other low-cost processors?

 

Then why develop one in the first place? A better strategy would be to develop low-power, high featured chipsets to support their existing low-cost processors.

Seems to me this is a classic case of the left hand not knowing that the right hand is doing in a big corporation: i.e. Sales and Marketing not talking to R&D.

 

This particular reference box won't be on sale. It doesn't mean there won't be Ion based machines coming in the future though... and Nvidia has a license to produce chipsets for FSB-based processors (anything more than that is debatable and we're waiting for the courts to decide).

 

What do you think of the value of Atom/Ion package, compared to an E5200 and micro atx G31 motherboard. IIRC, I read a review of such a system and the total power consumption was not much higher than the atom nettop, and ultimately nor was the price, but the performance was far greater. Outside of netbooks, are there really situations, where it is worth taking the hit in performance for the smaller chassis footprint?

 

I WANT ONE!!!!!!! haha, that thing would be absolutely amazing for a carputer! so glad i haven't bought the intel atom board yet. Can't wait!

 

Well, it's a question of whether you need that extra performance. For a home theatre box, you just need it to play video and be able to browse the internet (please correct me if I'm making the wrong assumption here) - that's as compute-intense as it'll get. For that, Ion makes an interesting option because it can handle everything up to high bit-rate Blu-ray discs.

The problem I found with Ion in general though was that because it was able to do tasks that even some 'full' systems can't do (like 1080p Blu-ray playback for example), I often expected it to do more than it can. The 9400M does a good job of dressing the Atom up as a capable processor when the reality is that it isn't able to do anything more intensive than word processing, (light) internet browsing and such.

 

Well early april comes the 2ghz atom so that would probably be a good workhorse for htpc usage, maybe your-junk-tube movies will play better. Why the hell do you want yo view youtube movies on your > 42" full hd plasma anyway...

 

You wouldn't. But you might want to watch YouTube when you're on the move - Ion will be both in 'nettops' and 'netbooks'. Not just the former.

 

WANT! This looks to be exactly what I've been trying to find for some time now. The fact that the whole lot is shoehorned on to a pico itx board makes it even better.

Were there any hints at all from nVidia regarding when they believe it's likely to reach the shelves or is it just a case of wait and see?

 

I reckon there'll be a few bits and bobs coming out before Computex and then more on show at Computex. Whenever I ask the ODMs about it though, they seem to want to run off and hide.

 

Sorry if I missed this, but what about power draw for the ION reference platform (whole system draw at the plug)? Surely that's a major factor in a box like this, which is likely to be used in an always-on scenario as say a personal server, NAS, HTPC, torrent box, etc.?

 

In an office environment this platform would be awesome. Problem with your machine, IT guy can just walk over with a spare and you'd be back up and running within a few minutes.

 

now this is really nice for HTPC use, for anything not at all, hmm like this I would say its worth buying.

 

There's a mistake on page 2:

2w - > 3w is a 50% increase (3-2 / 2 * 100)
8w -> 9w is a 12.5% increase (9-8 / 8 * 100)

Looks like a simple typo on the 40% figure.

 

Thanks for picking up on the typo - welcome to bit-tech!

 

What do you think the likely time frame of such technology hitting the consumer is, will we have are paws on Nvidia's ITX 9400 chipset board this year or next?

I really hope they use a standard ITX plateform for consumer release, so we can slap a BD-ROM drive on it, flash based storage coupled with a fat NAS based storage via Gbit lan.

Also it would give us a spare PCI slot for a decent PCI audio card.

HD HTPC all for less than £150 build cost! (including PSU, RAM, etc) yes please!

 

If it has some form of digital output, you don't really need a good soundcard. A good reciever or DAC will do that deed for you.

 

That is so true!

 

Re: Cuda applications and Badaboom, it does say that the GPU is capable of doing that - make sure you have the latest drivers! Thing is, this GPU has only 16 stream processors which is pretty weak. I believe the fps transcoding speed it can do is similar to its number of stream processors. I guess it would be good to designate badaboom to work on the job while being able to do other things - similar to having a multiple core CPU.

http://www.badaboomit.com/?q=node/122

 

LOL ) I don't know how it may be using for a home use... All devices like HDD DVD..must be external... keyboard and mouse usb...

I think it may be useful only for a thin clients for terminal server