Nvidia's Ion seeks to boost netbooks

WHILE NVIDIA DOES like banging on about Cuda at any given opportunity, the Green Goblin now has a new trumpet to blow: netbooks.

Last month the INQ had an exclusive chat with Nvidia's Veep of World Wide Sales, Renee Haas, as he evangelised to us on the virtues of pairing up an 9400M chipset with Intel's Atom processor to form the Ion platform.

There can certainly be no doubt about Nvidia's enthusiasm about this new netbook venture, with the firm spending much of last week's CES plugging it for all it was worth.

Of course, the GeForce 9400M chipset is not exactly a new kid on the block. Apple has already bunged it into its new MacBooks, so it is certainly far from being an unknown quantity.

But Netbooks are a whole different ball game to Macbooks and Nvidia was keen to show off its little Pico-ITX motherboard, complete with the GeForce 9400M and combining a north bridge (including memory controller), a south bridge, and GeForce DirectX 10-class graphics, all on one bit of silicon. Not unimpressive for a board measuring only 7.5cm by 10cm.

Whereas today's netbooks posess no GPU, no hard drive, analog rather than digital display and find themselves struggling to cope with premium OSs, Nvidia doesn't think it should have to be that way.

Praising the compatibility of the match between the Geforce 9400M and Atom, Haas told the INQ it was all "really about developing a platform which attaches to the Atom", noting, "When you take that chip and combine it with Atom, you actually have a pretty interesting platform. You have, essentially, a very full function PC".

It's no secret that Nvidia is of the opinion combining Atom with an Intel chipset constrains the experience, but now it is actually proposing a fix which should not only better the graphics but also make things like HD video, full streaming of videos or even tinkering about on photoshop a real and practical possibility, even on a netbook.

As for specs, the Ion board boasts dual-link DVI output, a Gigabit Ethernet port, SATA 3 Gbps, and high-def 7.1-channel LCPM audio. There is also a single SO-DIMM slot on the underside of the board which accepts a 1066MHz DDR3 memory module.

Whereas Chipzilla's Atom alone has notable difficulty with tasks like decoding 720p MPEG4 videos, Ion makes it look a breeze, providing superb image quality and no annoying hangs or dropped frames. Games, too, are actually playable on the Ion platform, although, as Haas pointed out, the Ion was not built to be a gamers platform and although possible, the experience is far from optimal.



This is clearly a message Nvidia believes in, and the firm is currently doing its damndest to persuade partners of the platform's merits for anything and everything from low-cost desktops and netbooks to home entertainment PCs.

The platform also does no harm whatsoever to the Nvidia gospel that GPUs are important too, and should cease to be treated as second class citizens when it comes to PC components.

After all, if significantly raising the performance bar on frustratingly slow and clumsy netbooks can be achieved simply by attaching a suitably fast GPU to a stripped down, low level CPU, what's not to like?

Nvidia hopes Ion-based desktops will hit shelves by the spring with low cost lappies making an appearance by the summer. µ