It’s not the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen, but this prototype of Nvidia’s ION nettop platform shows its colors. Bristling with USB ports, audio jacks and eSata adapters, it wants to prove that performance can come in small packages.
How best to illustrate this? Nvidia goes for the only benchmark that matters: gaming!
NVIDIA ION graphics processors will power a new generation of smaller, greener, fully capable PCs. Consumers utilizing ION-based PCs will be able to make full use of some of the world’s most popular applications, such as Spore, Call of Duty 4, Google Earth, Adobe® Photoshop®, Cyberlink PowerDVD, LEGO: Batman, and Battlefield 2. …
“New affordable and powerful PC hardware like ION is going to change the landscape of PC gaming,” said Ben Cousins, executive producer at DICE, a division of Electronic Arts. “This new mass-market target audience is a perfect match for Battlefield Heroes.”
Nvidia promises “10x faster graphics” on its tiny form-factor systems than “similar systems,” by which it means Pico- and Mini-ITX motherboards made by Via, and Intel’s relentlessly dismal integrated video chips.
Its aim is perhaps to establish a new tier of popular gaming systems that match game console performance instead of greatly exceeding it. From a practical standpoint, this approach is more likely to facilitate a stable PC gaming market than high-end plug-in video cards that only geeks buy.
World’s Leading Software Companies Rally Around NVIDIA ION [Nvidia]
Really the 10x faster graphics probably means any Intel integrated-video based board regardless of CPU. The current Atom boards all have really terrible GPUs. Once the Ion hits, a lot of the day to day performance difference between low end and mid-grade systems will evaporate.
Good point! ADDED REFWISE 2-4-09 NVIDIA ION
This will make such an excellent second PC. Able to run Photoshop also = teh win.
Seems like a good platform to base a Media Center PC on.
I’m getting ready to build a little dual-core Atom 330 system, but you better believe I have better graphics lined up for it than the on-bored (intentional) GMA graphics.
Only thing I don’t like from the picture is all those 3.5mm stereo jacks. They’re quite unsightly, especially considering you could get the exact same surround sound from a single coax or fiber cable.
@6 Only from (arguably) more expensive speakers. Coax and fiber generally send an encoded stream that needs a separate DSP to decode.
so XZZY, you hate those 3.5 mm stereo jacks but seem to ignore the optical audio port in the middle of the USBs?
I’ve been holding out on buying a new laptop because of the Ion. The small form factor and HD decoding would make it perfect in a living where I don’t want a beast of a PC, only thing I’m waiting for is a price.
@3: I run Photoshop just fine on my Asus 1000H eee… Am I missing something?
@WRYBREAD: I heard that Photoshop had support for GPU processing.
Can someone please tell me why there currently is no affordable, commercially made HTPC available on the market? Given the availability of systems like the ION and Via platforms, among others, why is this so? I would have thought there’d be a lot of competition in this marketplace now.
Anon12, the existing platforms like the Via are just not up to snuff as far as handling HD video and such. The Ion is the first Atom chipset that will be powerful enough to easily support HD video without an expensive external GPU – and it’s not available to the public in quantity just yet. So my hypothesis is that a few months after it is available, we’ll start seeing an influx of little, affordable HTPC type machines.