nVidia ION: Charging Intel's Atom

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In today's day and age we rely on mobile technology to aid us in our busy lives, but mobile technology has been hindered by the lack of processing power, until now. nVidia has come up with the solution - the ION platform.

Intel’s Atom is an ultra-low voltage processor commonly used in netbook and nettop platforms – these are inexpensive, low-wattage and tiny PCs, capable of handling most day-to-day tasks that don’t require large amounts of processing power. Due to the relative power of Atom and similar processors this market has had quite a lot of coverage this year and is only set to grow as the technology matures. You may already be familiar with it if you’ve ever seen Asus’ Eee PC and Eee Box products – these low cost solutions are perfect for simple online browsing, checking emails and so forth, and are all based on the Intel Atom processor technology.

Unfortunately, with such low power and cost comes a few limitations. Anything multimedia is typically quite processor intensive and will naturally perform poorly, whether it be watching a video on Youtube, playing back a DVD or Blu-ray format movie, or simple gaming. nVidia, however, have come up with a solution for this – the ION platform.

Taking the Intel Atom processor and combining it with their own GPU (graphics processing unit) technology, nVidia have extended the capabilities of what a netbook can handle without extensive upgrades to basically perform as a full desktop machine. DVD and Blu-ray discs can now be played back flawlessly due to the GPU’s capacity to handle these natively. This is fantastic for anyone wanting to invest in a home theatre PC (HTPC) system – you can now lie in bed, watch a movie, and check your mail without needing to get up!

As far as standard system performance goes, the ION doesn’t really give much more to the Atom processor, since it can really only handle a fairly specific selection of tasks. This is unfortunately one of the limitations of the platform – the ION is still reliant on the same aging processor technology that other Atom-based PCs are and, while newer Atom processors are dual cored (two processors on one chip), it simply doesn’t deliver enough to handle complex multimedia tasks. Where it does shine, however, is anything which can be accelerated over the GPU – whether this is simple gaming or rendering or DVD or Blu-ray playback. 


With all this being offloaded from the CPU, the ION is capable of delivering excellent playback quality while drawing minimal power and causing minimal noise. The entire system can be cooled passively via heatsinks, eliminating the need for air-cooling via fans, which are typically one of the loudest parts of a PC. Also, as mentioned, the system is also an incredibly low-power solution – drawing less than 30 watts while decoding DVD encoded movies. For comparison, a typical PC will draw around 150 watts for the same task, the Xbox360 around 125 watts, and your standard standalone DVD player may draw anywhere from 10 to 40 watts. So, if power is a concern, the ION is
definitely a winner here, consuming no more than a simple DVD player when under full load.


Issues will emerge, however, when you’re attempting to watch content that can’t be handled by the GPU – a perfect example of this is high-definition playback associated with the x.264 format. Typically, this may be high-definition content you’ve downloaded, it’ll suffer a noticeable playback problem on any Atom platform, ION or not. If nVidia end up offering native support for decoding these videos, this problem could very well disappear entirely and HTPC aficionados could be flocking to stores to take advantage of nVidia’s offering.

Let’s assume for a moment you want to actually use the ION for what it’s intended for: a low cost, good performance nettop machine. You’ll be able to browse the web, check your mail, listen to music or watch simple videos and the occasional DVD in full surround sound, if you choose – all of this can be achieved for less than $500. In addition to that, you’ll also be saving on your electricity bill due to the very low draw of the ION!

While multimedia is the intended target of the ION, there’s a number of other creative applications for a nettop. You may, for example, want to use it as a mass storage device. You’ll also have remote access to this machine, since you can connect it to the net – you may want to throw it in a data centre to support your server infrastructure, host backups, and manage them remotely if need be. That’s all very possible with the ION platform – even most basic models will allow you to connect a minimum of four internal SATA devices, meaning you could attach a 2 terabyte (TB) drive to each one and store a whopping 8TB on your backup host.

In addition to this, you might also attach an external hard drive, have a process set up to automatically copy your most recent backups to this drive, and detach it as a cheap and quick offsite backup solution each day. You may also find it useful to have a machine capable of monitoring other parts of your infrastructure just in case something goes wrong and alert you immediately to the fact, eliminating costs (and risks) associated with paying an offsite monitoring service to do the same.


So, there you have it – the ION platform is a powerful setup which could be used for a number of practical applications while also bearing cost in mind. A simple home theatre PC could be set up for roughly $500, allowing you to replace your current DVD or Blu-ray player with something which will likely have roughly the same power requirements, but a ton more functionality. You may want a simple, accessible backup solution – just add the cost of your additional hard drives and you’re done. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the ION as the netbook and nettop market expands and see what nVidia can further offer in this department to improve their product.

To find out more about nVidia's ION Platform, visit the official website here.