Hardware Nvidia's Ion Platform

Atom dual core is barely any better, it still won't play HL2 as its a CPU bound game and single threaded.

Probably the reason Intel or any manufacturers aren't in any hurry to put dual core Atom's in any netbooks, because performance is hardly any better for double the power.

 

While it's a shame that these don't exacly perform fantastically, I respect them for packing a full system with an atrocious amount of connectivity into a unit smaller than a videocard heatsink.

 

The majority of the power consumption in an atom system, is from the chipset, not the CPU. So, adding an extra core won't double the power consumption. The reason for delaying on a dual-core netbook is most probably economic, as any low-end product is extremely price sensitive and the typical user demographic of an atom, is unlikely to be tech savvy power users, who are willing to pay extra for better performance.

 

I wonder how much time it will take untill someone wc it...

 

Even if that isn't a retail box, it looks good enough to hide behind a TV or any other space you want to have a PC out of sight.

Especially if the price isn't too high, this could defo be a future purchase...

 

I think nividia is stupid for not selling that tiny system as a retail product.

 

Definately, it'd make a really good car pc or htpc

 

Source is definitely not single threaded.

 

thats nvidia.. almost should be their slogan XD I stopped buying anything they make- including any builds I'm working on.. not being able to play flash hd in youtube (which I've encoded myself like here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trGo-4jn61Q&fmt=22 ) is just a joke in 2009.. the ntune guy must have got a raise and then said oops oh yeah I forgot

 

ATI can't do it either on an Atom based system. Nobody is offloading flash onto the GPU and Atom isn't fast enough

 

No graphics card accelerates flash video - it's all done by the CPU. According to this article on Adobe's website, the only time hardware acceleration is used is to upscale video to full screen - the actual decoding is still done by your CPU. This is Adobe's fault, not Nvidia's or Intel's! Hopefully they'll add support soon... especially as Silverlight does video decoding in hardware.

 

I really want one of these i love the idea of having it as my media center in the living room as it is that small. As said all it needs is some form of remote control and it would be perfect

 

Didn't Intel say that the Atom cannot be used with anything but Intel chipsets, and refused to allow Nvidia to offer the ION with the Atom? I did read something about Nvidia going with the VIA Nano..

 

Dual-core Atom is already available. Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard uses dual-core, for example.

 

I know its not exactly relevant to ion vs 945 but feel that a third "full" system would have helped people (like me!). I'm planning a swap to an atom low power system soon, but will probably have to keep a "full" system for when more power needed. It would have been nice to have a 3rd "full" system just for comparison. ie,When reading the Gimp image tests I'd have loved to have a direct comparison between say atom-945 vs atom-ion vs C2D i45 etc

 

if they do go with the nano, that will be great, because the nano, totally owns the Atom in benchmarks.

 

Yep, it's true, but you can understand the disappointment when Ion can play Blu-ray movies but not YouTube HD. It's down to Adobe ultimately, but of course Atom isn't fast enough to do it on its own. That said, I'm hearing some interesting things about flash from a number of sources. I hope to get a better picture next week

 

ah that makes sense.. what's flash up to now ver. 10.. I used to write flash back in version 8- never had an issue with flv play back even on a amd k6-2 (granted I wasn't playing 720p).. so I was thinking this was on nvidias end.. I guess I'm just surprised

I wonder if adobe will use graphic card accel for flv video sometime soon.. then this box would be perfect.. I really don't like nvidia cause of the marketing end of things- they like to rehash and claim things that aren't true- like when they came out with the 9800gx2- the claims on crysis with the guy making a big whoop about it in a promotional video.. only to find out it was a total pos- it's like the ntune guy took over the company!

maybe I'm not giving them a fair shake nowdays.. just feel like they've shafted enough butts in 2008 and laughed all the way to the bank (but I like some of their partners like evga)

 

I'm trying not to write a text wall here, so the details will be a bit sketchy I think.

Atom is not a new architecture. The Intel CPU guys were looking at power budgets and seeing how stuff they did to improve performance affected power to fight the marketing war over power consumption AMD began.

Someone realized it was something like an exponential curve. So the looked backwards and, IIRC, started with the original Pentium architecture.


As for manufacturing, the Diamondville/945 stuff looks like it will carve out a nice in the embedded market.
Cor consumer stuff, the US15W SCH should help in the consumer space. It's only a single core but the feature sse, thermal characteristics and power usage fit better witht he netbook market.
The Panasonic Toughbook CFU1 is a prominent example of the platform, but there are a few others such as the Asus T91.

For youtube, would it be possible to make the system look like an iphone and get h.264 streams instead of flash?

 

I don't think it is up to them. Intel has to licence them to be able to do so, and for its own reasons it is reluctant to do so -- doesn't like the competition, for sure.

The real stupidity is Intel's, by designing a cool, low-power CPU and then coupling it to a hot, power-inefficient ageing chipset with limited features. Makes you wonder why they bothered.