Intel tries to backstop its own roadmaps - Bob Colwell, former Intel chief architect
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Acer releases the Aspire Revo ion nettop
NVIDIA FINALLY GOT a sucker to put out an 'ion' box. The tame press is fawning over and rewriting the press release, but the interesting parts are what isn't being said.
The product is a mini-PC called the Aspire Revo basically an Atom CPU with an NV 9400 chipset. It is truly a yawner of a product, but there are a lot of interesting things to talk about in spite of this, namely how the news was parsed.
First is that this is a 'desktop' machine, not a netbook. Two things of interest here, first is that Nvidia still can't get 9400 power use to levels needed for the mobile market, so the cherry-picked bins go to Apple, the rest go to everyone else. Since they suck too much (power that is) to go into mobile parts, they are now desktop units.
The second interesting bit is why Acer didn't use a Celeron to do the same job. Given that the machine is a desktop, and a few more watts wouldn't kill the project, using an Atom and a 9400 makes no sense. Looking at the latest Intel price list, the cheapest Atom is $20, but maxes out at 1.10GHz on a 400FSB. Since that one won't get out of its own way doing the tasks Nvidia curiously insists the Ion can do, they will be using a higher spec Atom 230.
That is less expensive than a Celeron 430, aka a 1.8GHz Conroe-based core, but this 1.6GHz Atom will also be obliterated by the Conroe. In fact, all Atoms will. The only difference that matters is wattage, and the Celeron takes more. Without battery life to concern yourself with though, who cares?
The Atom is the wrong chip to use here, it is far too slow, and you use none of its strengths, but get hit with all of its weaknesses. putting a 4W TDP CPU with a 12-15W (estimated) chipset is, well, stupid. If you pay $5 extra for the Celeron CPU, it is money well spent considering the apps you want to run actually run right.
The TDP of the Celeron is 35W, easily dissipated by a cheap heatsink. Any 'faster' Atoms are $10 more than the Celeron, but they don't gain any clock speed, just a second core. The Celeron is still notably more powerful.
Nvidia and Acer picking the Atom here is simply dumb. We know they have a warehouse full of non-Apple spec 9400s they want to dump, but they really should have slapped a Celeron behind it. The only reason that the Atom makes the barest minimum sense is that NV is desperate for an ego boost to try and leverage into a netbook win.
Toss in Vista and you have something that moves with the speed of a syphilitic water buffalo wearing leg irons. Come on now... Vista? Really? They can't be serious. Think about performance here, or lack thereof. Me II barely runs on a real desktop, and they are trying to put it on an anaemic pretender with a buggy chipset?
Getting back to the apps, it is rather humorous to see exactly how much critical thought journalists are putting into the articles, look here and here. Notice they print the same 'features' list, parroted back as if they were gospel.
Remember when journalists were critical, and thought about things they wrote instead of regurgitating PR bull? When you actually test the things instead of taking an honest company's PR statements at face value, you realise that the product doesn't quite run the games they list correctly, and has problems with the video content as well. Don't forget, kiddies, that 'ion' in the Tech Report article has twice the CPU power as the Aspire Revo.
How much is this joke of a platform going to cost you? According to Hot Hardware above, it will have an MSRP of $299 or so. For that money, you can get a Dell Inspiron, a Radeon 3650, and pocket enough to buy yourself some munchies. The Dell will annihilate the Ion in every performance category you can think of, and comes with a DVD-RW drive, keyboard, mouse and accessories.
To top it off, the Dell will actually run the things that NV claims the Ion will but independent testing shows isn't really the case. That claimed $50 premium for the 9400 is really well spent, don't you think? On one hand you get something that works, on the other you get all the marketing power of 'ion', but not a box that runs the things you want it to.
In the end, the Ion is a joke. NV has a lot of 9400s that they want to get rid of, and they found a sucker to put their name on the side. I pity the poor fools who buy this thing and expect it to work right... it won't. It is simply underpowered and overhyped.
If you are in the market for a box like this, wait for the Via or AMD-based boxes, or buy the Dell. You won't be sorry.
It just goes to show, you can buy good press. µ
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You know what, I didn't pay $299 for my Revo. I paid $199, and I'm pretty damn well happy with the machine I got for the price. Not everybody cares to be a power user. Especially in this economy I think a product like the Revo will do very well. My other option was to buy a $600 Dell Studio hybrid. A more powerful machine? Of course. But is the Revo sufficient? With an add-on optical drive for maybe $50 or $60 bucks I'd say YES! My machine isn't running Vista, it's running XP and it's more than quick enough. I don't care about the business politics of computer companies or who needs to dump a warehouse full of chips. I got an attractive and fast enough machine for little more than a third of the money I had planned on spending. Nettops are a GREAT idea and Acer definitely has a winner here!
A bit late, but... GUYS !
NVIDIA ION is a system/motherboard platform that includes NVIDIA's GeForce 9400M (MCP79) GPU and Intel's Atom on a Pico-ITXe motherboard designed for netbook and nettop devices.
Do you get it ? It's an NVIDIA ION *exactly* because it has an Atom processor in there. Yes, you can put a Celeron by the 9400M, but then it's not the same product.
Read this:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1051898/raja-koduri-leaving-ati
Got it?
Charlie is NOT a journalist, but an AMD/ATI's salesman.
Watts run about $1/year in the states, and more abroad. A 40 watt Atom runs $40 per year. A 200 watt Inspiron runs $200 per year. For a desktop, the Atom makes a lot of sense over the Celeron if you look at total cost of ownership rather than purchase price.
This article seems to be based on what it doesn't live up to, but does not appear to have tried it as far as I can tell.
Sounds like alot of pissing from someone with neither the beer or the jon.
There's many, many reasons to choose the atom over the celeron. The celeron uses an entirely different, more expensive chipset; same video core, but much different chipset from what is in the macbooks. The celeron is a socketed cpu that uses more contacts, and thus takes up more space and cost to either solder it to the board or use a socket. The celeron requires only 10W more power, yes, but also at different voltages. That plus the 50% increase in power consumption would necessitate a bigger power supply than a small, inexpensive wall wart.
And what would you gain from having the celeron? Some performance I guess, but to what end? You'd lose is reliability, energy savings, small size, and lower price. This box is meant to play 1080p video and maybe show picture slideshows/web browse on your tv. It does that very well.
The reason they're coming with vista ( which I agree, is a bad idea. there should be a tweaked vista for netbooks etc) is because XP just went out of mainstream support, and is also not generally available for non-business PCs with 1gb of RAM by default.
I'm still more eager to see the ion for the via nano though. And $300 is still too much. Make it $200! You can get an eee or dell mini for that (on sale).
Simples. It's massive! Huge, far to large. If I want something the size of a server I'll go buy a server. The reason for the Revo is that it's a lot smaller than a normal desktop. So it won't play Crisis. Who cares? that's not what I want it for anyway. Lets be honest though even the revo is massive! A picoITX board is 12cm square. I want a PC that small, in a case, so lets say 5cm high and about 12.5cm square. Any bigger is too big.
Oh, I followed Chucks link to Dell (who's paying him?) and noted their slimstyle Studio. Still way too big compared to the Revo, and 4 times the price, and that's the smallest they've got.
Hey Chuck, it's "try to," not "try and."
If you can't get the grammar correct (and you ARE a writer, aren't you?), then what else can't you get correct?
I can't take seriously the opinion of someone who hasn't the grammar skills to actually write it.
The Ion meets it target requirements, aside from not releasing the dual core Atom at this point.
In order to make a system that is inexpensive, small size, low noise, supports HD video, and low power this makes good sense. Any other CPU will be far more expensive (compare Atom physical size and price to Celeron, big difference) and require greater cooling requirements and therefore make more noise and physical size. (one of the complaints of attaching a PC or some of the newer game consoles to the family TV is the size and noise)
Apple already makes the 9400 platform with faster CPU's. Also, this design concept provides 17 processors for $300, that's a bargain. What the design is expecting is the rise in CUDA, OpenCL, and Microsoft's version of GPUPU to take advantage of the 17 processors, which is how most game consoles are built (i.e. they rely on multiprocessing). Atom is a new and simple part so the pricing may continue to decline.
Area? Maybe but they can probably squeeze it in. Heat/power? No... Celeron 220 has Tcase of 100C and you don't want you system to be that temperature, ever really...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Atom-Athlon-Efficient,1997-4.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Atom-Athlon-Efficient,1997-5.html
15C under load, and 4.4W/11.2W difference...
http://www.mini-itx.com/2009/02/04/nvidias-ion-reference-platform-reviewed-benchmarked
They got a pretty big cooler for Ion already so what is 10W more going to do?
Looking at the physical appearance of the Revo, and the ports that've been provided (*cough* HDMI *cough*) it seems fairly obvious that Acer see the Revo being an addition to peoples living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, anywhere they've got a nice flat panel TV which they want to enable for playback of all the nice media files they might have stored on their local network, or that they want to shovel onto the internal drive. In that context, pairing up the relatively low power CPU with a higher-powered graphics core which allows much of the video decode work to be offloaded from the CPU makes perfect sense...
As for why they chose the Atom over the Celeron, a quick comparison of the specs over on the Intel site (using the links handily provided by Charlie) shows that
a) the Celeron is both more power-hungry than the Atom AND has a max. case temperature 25 deg.c lower than the Atom - so even if both CPUs were able to run at the same power levels and dissipate the same amount of heat, you'd still need to work harder cooling the Celeron to avoid exceeding the allowable operating temperature. In such a cramped design as the Revo, internal temperatures can easily exceed safe operating values unless you've got a bloody good cooling setup, so putting the Atom in there makes sense - not only does it dump less heat into the system, it can also tolerate higher temperatures without falling over...
b) the Celeron requires roughly 900 sq.mm more PCB space than the Atom, and on a PCB as small as the one in the Revo, that's a significant amount of additional space to be providing...
I wonder why this article was written:p
I wonder if the author is still a teenager looking for a powerful PC for harcore gaming :)
I am owning an Atom based notebook, MSI WIND one of the best of this category and i am fully satisfied. I am doing almost all but gaming in fact :p But who cares? Video games are really needing powerful computer and its not the aim of a Atom Based computer. The one part i agree with is ACER should have put dual core Atom in that box. I wanna such box from Nvidia with ION chipset and dual core atom for low cost and low energy home server and i think only such computer will fit perfectly... Indeed i owned a Celeron computer and it was the worse s* made ever in compare ;) . So i dont think it would be a good choice for a low cost computer, it would as silly as using a dual core atom with the chipset Intel GN40 or the actual GM950.
Charlie, your trolling skills are a bit amateurish.
I think Charlie is just right on about Acer should have chose to use Celeron instead of Atom.
It seems like a no brainer to me, if I choose to sacrifice power efficiency for a 9400 then a few watts more for a CPU that can actually utilize the graphics power makes perfect sense...
On the other hand if I just want a low power desktop for router, file server, light web server, etc why do I need the graphics power?
Small form factor has always come at a price premium, the argument that a regular Dell desktop would be cheaper with better performance has been true since since at least the days of Mini-ITX, Shuttle, and the like. It is not a valid point to bash the Ion nettop with.
All that matters is how it stacks up, in price and performance, against the Intel GMA powered competition in the same form factor. The Eee BOX is the most obvious point for comparison.
I admit that putting Vista on this thing seems a bit ambitious, however.
Look at http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1239146452742.html. Intel is clear they want nVidia disappear and try to make them out of their core logic business. And Intel pay Charlie too to discredited nVidia and help intel make room for their upcoming larabee.
Ok Charlie.
Nvidia and Intel will be stop ION platform after your spectacular article! Congratulations! They got the message! :D
I can't believe you, how to compare DELL's desktop and ION nettop!
I will sell my HTPC's and buy one of them!
Looks like Charlie just snap. Man, he is pretty much losing it. The whole point of using ion is building the lowest-wattage PC that can run basic Windows task in the very very small form factor. That way, that same tech in this nettop can translate to building a netbook too. I can see my putting something like this in my Car.
Charlie, Thanks for the jab in this article here but we've run Ion with a single core Atom setup and it handles 1080p content easily. The IGP offloads the HD video decode quite easily actually. Besides, who says printing a claimed features list is crime or otherwise shoddy journalism? If it's just an announcement, I think the audience is smart enough to know that they should wait for full evaluations before passing judgment.
It is clear frome the article Charlie hates NVIDIA and apid by Intel.
He is avoiding facts and rampling on BS.
I think the point of the Ion is not to play Crysis, but to improve upon the Intel formula for the netbook idea. I personally am waiting for the Ion to come out in mass (hopefully). I would like the bit extra graphics horsepower to help with work related items like powerpoint. In addition, having the ability to watch movies and game on the road for maybe 5 hours of battery like is a great idea and for $300 - $400. My psp was nearly that much when I got it. Do I expect to play hardcore games, absolutely not. I have a ton of older games that I got in bundles for video cards, mainboards etc that I never had the time to play. This ion machince might be perfect for that. In addition, I can live with regular DVD's. I don't need HD on a netbook.
We all know the PS3 is overpriced at $399 with blueray. You can get a 360 w/ harddrive for $250. You can build a wind top with a GMA950 for $200. No way in hell does ion cost $100. This is a $250 product at launch MAX. You hype nerds are pushing up the price. That's not worth the upgrade from our XBMC.
This is the best nettop design so far.
How big a heatsink is for 35W CPU? And how do you compare the form factor of Dell's desktop to Acer's Ion-top?
This article is full of statements like Apple vs Orange.
When will Charlie realise that his relentless, Terminator-like, devotion to killing off Nvidia's reputation, is increasingly affecting his ability to think straight and write articles which manage to make their points without needing to resort to the same sort of trickery and sleights of hand he seems to think are oh so bad when they come from someone in the Nvidia PR department?
He says: "When you actually test the things instead of taking an honest company's PR statements at face value, you realise that the product doesn't quite run the games they list correctly, and has problems with the video content as well. Don't forget, kiddies, that 'ion' in the Tech Report article has twice the CPU power as the Aspire Revo."
The TR articles says: "We'll start with video playback, where the GeForce 9400's video decode engine should make up for the Atom's lack of processing horsepower. Since most Atom-based netbooks and even nettops only come with single-core processors, we disabled one of the Ion platform's cores for these tests."
So, TR make it quite clear that, for the video playback tests at least, they were limiting the reference system to the SAME amount of CPU power as in the Revo, and still managed to achieve pretty decent results. Would you have been able to infer that from Charlie's comments? Because I didn't. Indeed, had I taken his review at face value, I'd now be thinking Ion must be a real pile of poo if even paired with a dual-core Atom it still had problems with video playback... Ooh dear Charlie, has your hatred of Nvidia pushed you so far over the edge that you feel the need to bend the truth or omit any facts which don't support your position in order not to make any of their products seem even remotely useful?
OK, in fairness to Charlie, I should point out that TR did find problems during single-core playback.
With ONE title.
One title which shows a similar thirst for raw CPU grunt on other platforms. Hardly grounds for writing off Ion+Atom as a viable video playback platform in general.
And considering the Revo doesn't even have a built-in bluray drive, chances are pretty high that any HD material it plays back is going to be recompressed from the original bluray/broadcast source into H.264 (which the TR review suggests is quite compatible with the single core Atom+Ion combo), stripped of its DRM and any other overheads that would be wasting precious CPU cycles, and packaged up neatly into a single MKV file ready for slurping off the net via your favourite torrent client. Probably. Not that I know *anything* about this sort of thing...
So, what we have is a remarkably compact Wintel-compatible box with HDMI output, which is powerful enough to be used for playback of all the media files which are commonly to be found online, and which is easily powerful enough to also be used for a spot of web browsing, emailing, IM'ing etc. - sounds like the ideal addition to the family lounge area. If I didn't already have another of Acer's cute little Aspire systems (L5100) working as a mediacentre PC, I'd be seriously considering getting one of these Revos instead.
Oh, and to the fanbois out there, I'm not pro or anti anyone here. I've got Nvidia, ATI and Intel chipsets in the PCs at home, all I care about when I'm buying components is whether they do what I need them to do at a price I'm willing to pay for them.
So it's not Charlies constant attacks on Nvidia that concern me, it's the way he seems to be rapidly throwing away the journalistic integrity he once had (and I've been reading the Inq long enough to remember a time when his articles were actually something to look forward to) in order to continue producing these increasingly unjustified attack pieces aimed at the same target over and over again. Replace Nvidia with ANY other company, and I'd be feeling just as let down by him as I am now.
C'mon Charlie, let it lie and get back to writing decent articles that any IT journo would be proud of. Please.
Give me a brake, can you possibly show anymore bias here? You have some good points in relation to celeron vs atom but its hard to see this after reading through all the blatant bias.
Thank you Charlie, for pissing in my breakfast cereal this morning. I was all exited about this new Ion platform, and the endless applications for such a small and capable machine (Mythbox front-end anyone?). Thank you for doing your duties as a journalist, but please understand that you ruined my day.
Inqtop, not only comes it with an eSATA port, it also sports a card reader and a 250 gig hard drive. Admittedly, this is nothing huge by todays standard. But it would still be more than sufficient to run as a decent media centre. Throw in a wireless keyboard and you have the perfect couch-companion if you park this next to your TV.
Come to think of it, that is actually not a bad package for $300.
On the plus side, I like to point out that this machine comes with an eSATA port. Those of us who know that USB is no good for hard disks and DVD drives (especially when connected via a hub) will certainly appreciate this feature. But why is there only 1 eSATA port? Never mind.
Apropos heat sink, does this little machine still need a fan? Even my Acer Aspire One netbook has one, and that makes me VERY unhappy.
If the above analysis is fair then you have to ask why did they make it?
After thermals TDP and minimal formfactor the one remaining issue would be ... price? I wonder what kind of a deal they got on the 9400 chipsets, reputedly HD capable which the Intel is not.
So you would have to ask Acer marketing what the point of it all was, but my guess would be they will market it as an HD friendly media netbox with green credentials and will try to get some applesque wowcool out of the formfactor paired with the intriguing ion. Which judging from the photos they have been working on.
I will be interested to see how well it serves the needs of its users. With any nVidia product you run the risk of gun barrel vision support and losing out if your needs fall anywhere outside the centre of what they view as the mainstream.
Charlie, you could be so right and the Ion platform may indeed be the most useless piece of hardware this side of a dedicated PhysX card. But it is so difficult to get through all your whinge and spin that is really difficult to see your point.
You keep on moaning about spoon-fed journalism, and I thin you are right. But in my book they way you like to package your "truths" does not do you any favours either.
I can't see the need for this match up either, it seems that the Atom is in there because it's the 'cool' thing at the moment.
What's the power draw from an Ion platform anyway?
Calm down Charlie Brown... Why are you so angry? Show me on the dolly where the nasty man touched you.