NVIDIA's Ion Small Form-Factor PC Platform

I decided that mITX and SFF are my favorite types of PCs..... this definitely makes me smile

The thing is sweet for sure. I could see it nestled in with the rest of my TV and Stereo equipment, running off that HDMI output.

Very cool PC, I Liked the video you had of it at CES as well. It should almost take the place of a HTPC, if you used the ESATA ports for a few 1TB stand alone hard drives.

Der Meister:

Very cool PC, I Liked the video you had of it at CES as well. It sould almst take the place of a HTPC, if you used the ESATA ports for a few 1TB stand alone hard drives.

 

Exactly, Der... It's got the expansion but also has a 2.5" notebook drive built in and you can get up to even 500G now in that form factor.

Your only limiter would be that it looks like it only holds one 2.5" drive -- at the moment this means no more than 500GB of storage -- unless you put all kinds of ext hdds with the unit i guess but what'd be the point of having a sleek computer with dongles and drives all over hanging off of it?

I want one in my car!

sweet little peice of gear. I am sure you could hook it up to a NAS or something for more storage.

40Mbps 1080p video? It's hard to believe but if it is really that fast, then I am very impressed. I want one, lol. I could see some day in my life for my children (if I will have some) to have something like this for school. As technology gets better, I bet it will get incorporated into everyday school life.

Like Pete too, I find it hard to believe. Although, is an Atom fast enough to decode HD video? I would of thought they would use a low power Core 2 Duo instead, as the two cores would help alot. I wonder how much these would cost.

tanka12345:

Like Pete too, I find it hard to believe. Although, is an Atom fast enough to decode HD video? I would of thought they would use a low power Core 2 Duo instead, as the two cores would help alot. I wonder how much these would cost.

It's the IGP in the GeForce 9400M doing the decode and it nearly offloads the host processor completely.

Dave_HH:

tanka12345:

Like Pete too, I find it hard to believe. Although, is an Atom fast enough to decode HD video? I would of thought they would use a low power Core 2 Duo instead, as the two cores would help alot. I wonder how much these would cost.

It's the IGP in the GeForce 9400M doing the decode and it nearly offloads the host processor completely.

If that is so Dave, it looks like a very appealing platform. The only issue I have with it now is the fact that AMD is not associated with this great technology. A key question: Where does AMD fit into all of this? Think about it. AMD could suddenly pop up with a platform likely to be better because they won't have any issues about different parties making different components. AMD and ATI could work in harmony using possibly a mobile 4000 series GPU and one of their dual core processors. I hope they do try and do something, as Intel and Nvidia will benefit from that platform. (Although it could provide greater rewards to focus more on desktop processors and even faster GPUs) )

My netbook drops frames even at 720p. If that tells you about the Atoms HD ability. The 9400m would do the job I'm sure though. I really like this little guy a lot. I also saw a ITX board from CES with wifi, socket 775, and a PCIe slot. That thing looked nice.

I thought that the main stumbling block with Ion and netbook/ small form factor was Intel itself not wanting to work with the Ion platform and remain with its own chipset? Imagine a netbook factor/ windows 7 and Ion it would be all but perfect for the daily commute!

bob_on_the_cob:

My netbook drops frames even at 720p.

The question is...why are you watching HD media on a 7" screen???!!??!

Output to my TV. Failed experiment.

^lol

There was nothing in the story about when we might to see actual products based on Atom/Ion..  Any clues?

jaynoon:

There was nothing in the story about when we might to see actual products based on Atom/Ion..  Any clues?

No unfortunately....

MythTV .22, When will you be released so that we can take advantage of VDPAU (out of trunk)?

This will make a great front-end for MythTV to play HD h.264 1080p videos w/ VDPAU on.