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| Introduction and Specifications | ||||
In early January, back from our roadtrip to Vegas with CES show buzz and bewilderment still fresh in our minds, we brought you an interview with Drew Henry, General Manager of NVIDIA's MCP products. Drew gave us a first-hand glimpse at a new small form factor PC platform that NVIDIA was developing based on their recently released GeForce 9400M chipset with integrated graphics. In this new era of HTPCs, netbooks, nettops and all things tiny in general, NVIDIA's Ion reference platform for the Intel Atom processor offers the promise of an ultra low-profile, low power device that quite literally fits in the palm of your hand, and thus could be easily tucked away in various small places in a number of different usage models.
As you can see in the block diagram above, with the exception of things like I/O port connectors, power and passive components on the PCB, and physical layer chips for network and video connectivity, Ion is essentially a one chip solution. Supporting Intel's processor families from Core 2 to low power Atom solutions, NVIDIA's Ion MCP offers a multitude of various subsystem functionality. The chipset supports both DDR2 and DDR3 system memory and offers a single x16 PCI Express 2.0 link, as well as 4 x1 links and up to five standard PCI slots. In addition, support for both dual link DVI, HDMI, Display Port and analog RGB video output is built in, along with up to 12 USB 2.0 ports, 6 SATA ports and a single Gigabit Ethernet port. Finally, of course the integrated graphics core of the GeForce 9400M with its 16 shader engines, offers full DX10 compatibility and full HD video hardware offload, in addition to other features like Hybrid SLI and NVIDIA's CUDA technology. To say that the GeForce 9400M is a Swiss Army knife of a chip may sound a bit cliche' but it's also very true. If you'd like a full refresh on NVIDIA's family of GeForce 9300 and 9400 chipsets, we've covered them in depth here previously. Once you're up to speed on the chipset, let's journey on with a closer look at NVIDIA's new Ion Small Form Factor PC. |
| A Closer Look At Ion |
 NVIDIA's Ion SFF platform definitely packs a lot of functionality into a very small footprint. Pictured here below is the Ion reference motherboard, sans its I/O expansion daughter card, sitting next to a full sized desktop motherboard. Though the desktop board, when fully configured, offers a lot more muscle with a discrete graphics card and the like, it's pretty impressive to note that the Ion board essentially offers much of the same basic functionality, in a tiny fraction of the real estate.
 NVIDIA Ion relative to standard sized motherboard - Pico ITX - The Big Tiny The NVIDIA Ion box we'll be putting through its paces in the pages ahead, is a standard reference design that is built with the intent of bringing out all of the primary functionality of the product for demonstration and testing purposes only. It's not designed with a ton of flare as a result, however, and this small black box (ours test system actually came in pure white), with the exception of its custom cut NVIDIA logo ventilation slots, only impresses with its diminutive casing which is a little larger than a standard 3"x5" index card.
;) ;) ;) Click for high res images... ;) ;) ;) Interestingly, as is plain to see in the above motherboard shots, Ion's GeForce 9400M MCP actually dwarfs the Intel Atom 230 processor pictured here, which is the smaller of the two large chips on the right side of the board. We should note, however, that the Ion unit we tested was powered by a dual-core Atom 330 processor. With 16 graphics cores, a DDR2/3 memory controller and a whole lot of control logic and I/O functionality like PCI Express links, USB and SATA, it's no wonder either. Cooling these two chips is a single active fansink assembly that, under normal operation, frankly was a bit louder than we would have liked, clearly audible over the low hush of our 50" plasma TV in our test area. That said, the Iittle fellow wasn't so loud that it became a distraction in any significant way.
Our Test Unit - Thumbnail Images, Click For High Res...
;) ;) ;)  On the Ion base motherboard itself, there are dual link DVI, HDMI, USB2.0, a Gigabit Ethernet, VGA d-sub connectors and a power connector. In reality, these are really the only I/O ports required for a fully functional system over an HDMI cable, though the I/O daughter board brings out a whole slew of expansion options on the front side of the system, including 6 USB 2.0, two eSATA , 7.1 surround sound, S/PDIF audio and the system power button.
With GPU-Z running on the NVIDIA Ion reference PC, we can see some of the GeForce 9400M's particulars. Detailed here, the GeForce 9400M is outfitted with 16 shader cores, 4 ROPs, and a 64-bit memory interface. According to GPU-Z, the GPU core operates at 200MHz when idling at the Windows desktop, and runs at a relatively cool 37ºC. |
| Test Systems, HD Video and Demo Video | ||||||||||||
In the following performance evaluations we've pitted NVIDIA's Ion reference PC against a myriad of systems based on either Intel Atom processor designs or in one case, VIA's Nano reference platform and the VIA Nano L2100 processor. The performance numbers we've provided along side the NVIDIA Ion platform's performance are presented for a frame of reference more than anything else, since it was nearly impossible to provide identically configured test systems. As such these test metrics should not be considered an "apples to apples" comparison, but rather a general correlation of how the Ion platform will perform versus similar, low power platforms in its peer group.
Since to us, NVIDIA's tiny little Ion box simply begged to be setup as a Home Theater PC, we decided to dive right into HD Digital Video testing. We corralled both H.264 encoded 1080p QuickTime clips, as well as 1080p Windows Media clips and fired them up to check system resource utilization, system responsiveness and general fluidity.
Below we've tested the system with two different media players, Cyberlink's Power DVD8 and Windows Media Player. The version of Power DVD 8 that was tested was specifically provided by Cyberlink as a press beta build optimized to take advantage of NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology that is found in the GeForce 9400 GPU. In this case, NVIDIA's PureVideo engine almost completely offloads the host processor (the Atom CPU) for all video decode workloads. Conversely, in our Windows Media Player tests, the system is going to be reliant on more standard DirectX video acceleration on the PureVideo engine, which won't be utilizing the technology to its fullest potential. Let's have a look at the results. ;) ;) Ion HD Video Playback - PowerDVD 8 (right) and Windows Media Player (left) On the left side shot, our 1080p Dark Knight trailer clip runs silky smooth exhibiting only about 20% CPU utilization on what could essentially be considered an Atom 230 single core processor with Intel HyperThreading enabled. We've actually disabled one of the physical cores in the Atom chip via a setting in Windows Vista and thus only two processing threads are shown in the Windows Task Manager Performance Monitor. Regardless, the results are quite impressive for the Ion system, with low CPU utilization and beautifully smooth performance. In the right hand shot, we have the system setup the same way, only now we're playing back a 1080p Windows Media clip with a standard Windows Media Player installation in Vista. As you can see, Performance Monitor has spiked up to 60% processor resource utilization here. However, we're happy to note that even under this rather heavy workload, Ion platform didn't drop a frame and playback was perfectly smooth. That said, as Ion-based products come to market, the key for system builders will be to bundle various media player software with properly optimized NVIDIA PureVideo CODEC packages. Finally, we'll wrap up this test section with a live demo of the NVIDIA Ion reference PC platform doing what it does best apparently, in a typical HTPC (Home Theater PC) environment. Let's have a look...
We hope that wasn't too much of a spoiler for you. Benchmark numbers are next... |
| High Level Synthetics - SANDRA | ||||
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 test suite with NVIDIA's Ion reference PC platform (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and the Disk Storage tests). All of the scores reported below were taken with the Atom processor running at its default clock speed of 1.6GHz, with 2GB of DDR3-1066 system memory.
We also set the Atom processor to either one or two cores enabled, essentially providing metrics for both Atom 230 and Atom 330 configurations.     In three of the four tests above, NVIDIA's Ion reference PC platform falls in line with competing Atom-based solutions that were powered by 1.6GHz N270 notebook variants of the Atom chip, though the Ion platform does show a very slight edge in spots. In the storage test, the 200GB Seagate Momentus 2.5" hard drive NVIDIA built our Ion test system with, is showing a slight edge as well. Conversely, on the memory bandwidth side of the equation, the Ion's DDR3 configuration we tested, with its higher CAS 8 latency settings, is coming up a tad short versus some of the DDR2 and Intel 945 Express-based Atom netbooks in our test group. |
| Cinebench Software Rendering | ||||
Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.  We decided to include our Cinebench numbers here though frankly the test is more of a processor benchmark than anything else. That said, obviously NVIDIA's GeForce 9400M chipset is enabling the Atom CPU to do its thing and with NVIDIA's memory controller in the mix as well, so the test is still worth a quick look. Here the Ion drops in neck and neck with Intel's own 945 Express chipset and when we enabled the second Atom core in the Atom 330 CPU that came in the Ion reference PC, the score jumped to almost twice the performance. We ran the multithreaded version of the Cinebench test and unfortunately VIA's Nano is a single core, single threaded processor, so it couldn't run the test. |
| Gaming: Left 4 Dead and ET: Quake Wars | ||||||||||||
Gaming on the NVIDIA Ion reference PC proved to be a bit of a mixed bag. To be honest, we didn't really expect to be able to thrash it out at high resolution with an integrated graphics solution. Though admittedly, with an NVIDIA core GPU under the hood, the GeForce 9400 should provide some level of game play, whereas a competing Intel solution would be a non-starter. What was surprising however, was that it wasn't a graphics limitation necessarily but a CPU limitation that was holding back some upside performance.
 The Ion platform shows that gaming at 720p, even with a dual core Atom 330, is very much CPU-bound. Notice the frame rate drop in the Atom 230 scores versus the Atom 330 scores, which are a lot more significant than the variance we see in dropping from 1280x720 to 800x600 resolution. It's painfully obvious in the Atom 230 scores where the numbers are pretty much flat across the two resolutions. In short, and as you'll see in the next gaming test, Ion needs at least a low power Core 2 dual core under the hood, if you really want to game a bit more on the platform - which can of course be done since all Intel socket 775 processors are supported by NVIDIA's GeForce 9400 chip.
 Enemy Territory Quake Wars testing underscored this CPU-bound scenario even further, with virtually no difference in performance when scaling resolutions one way or the other. However, with another Atom core at the helm, we did get a bit more headroom. The ET:Quake Wars engine isn't optimized as well for multi-core processors, so adding additional threads only buys you so much. It's raw CPU core throughput and system bandwidth that is needed here and then perhaps we could see the limits of the GeForce 9400 GPU under these test conditions. |
| Power Consumption | ||||
Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing with NVIDIA's Ion platform, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power a few of our systems consumed while idling and under a heavy workload, versus the Ion platform.
Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards or processors alone. For this test, we loaded up both Cinebench and our 1080p Dark Night video clip to stress the CPU and GPU cores in the Ion system. Then we fired up ET: Quake Wars to compare notes between multimedia power consumption and gaming power consumption.
 As it turned out, the peak load power numbers you see here for the Ion system are indicative of power consumption under a gaming workload, versus our simultaneous video playback and Cinebench test. Though the multimedia test taxed the Atom processor completely with Cinebench, video playback only exercised the PureVideo engine of the GeForce 9400 GPU and not all available stream processor core resources. During a gaming session peak power consumption was realized and in general was about 1 - 2 Watts higher than when the system was stressed in our multimedia test. Incidentally, the Ion system was able to play back our Dark Night test clip without dropping a frame of skipping a beat, though its Atom CPU was pegged at 100% utilization by the Cinbench render test running in the foreground. Finally, versus the other Atom-based products we tested, the Ion system did consume more power both at idle and under loaded conditions, but that was to be expected with the beefy GeForce 9400M drawing a bit more with its more capable GPU and video engine core. |
| Performance Summary and Conclusion | ||||
Performance Summary: The NVIDIA Ion Small Form Factor reference PC platform proved itself to be a powerful multimedia machine with top-notch HD video playback capability and even a bit of light duty gaming performance available as well. In standard desktop and productivity applications, the machine was about on par with similarly equipped Intel Atom-based products. However, when tasked under multimedia workloads, the Ion offered best-of-class performance. In our demo video we also were able to prove out the machine's capabilities over an HDMI output, where the Ion showed excellent desktop image quality and great HD audio and video reproduction over our THX certified amplifier and through a 50" plasma TV.
In fact, for the HTPC crowd, there's little question NVIDIA's Ion PC represents a breakout product, one where discrete graphics and their associated power consumption, heat and noise, can be dismissed for a fully integrated platform capable of all the tasks at hand. Wrap up Ion in some prettier skins, add a wireless keyboard and mouse, maybe a multi-function remote, and we think there may be more than a few NVIDIA sales engineers that will be looking at design wins over the next few quarters. We'll bring this preview to a close and offer that, while we can't give any awards to a product that you simply can't buy yet as we have tested it here today, the long and short of Ion, for us is, we want one - preferably sooner than later. Would we give it and Editors Choice if this was a retail SKU from one of the major OEMs? You betcha. We'll be waiting in anticipation to see Ion in retail-ready form in the months ahead.
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