NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 3, 2009 9:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Ion’s Performance: Generally Faster
I ran a couple of real world application tests on the Ion to see if it offered any tangible performance benefits outside of gaming. To my surprise, it did.
The first test was our standard Photoshop CS4 benchmark. I don’t expect anyone to want to edit photos on an Atom based machine but if you find yourself in such a predicament let’s see how the Ion performed:
NVIDIA’s Ion platform is 20% faster in our Photoshop benchmark than Intel’s standard 945G.
The next test is far more basic and very realistic: it’s a WinRAR compression test. I’m simply taking several files and compressing them using WinRAR. This is a very CPU intensive task and actually takes an annoyingly long time on any Atom based machine.
Here Ion is 15% faster than Intel’s standard Atom platform and it’s a very realistic usage scenario, even for an Atom.
While you can argue that you may not game on an Atom based machine and you wouldn’t want to edit images in Photoshop on one either, compressing files will happen and it just happens faster on Ion.
The advantage here appears to be memory bandwidth. While 945G is limited to a single DDR2-667 channel, the Ion reference platform runs DDR3-1066 yielding nearly 60% more memory bandwidth.
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IntelUser2000 - Friday, February 6, 2009 - link
You might want to know that the version of 945 used on the Netbooks is 945GSE. It is a very low power part. It's TDP spec is only 5.5W.Don't be thinking because its 0.13u its a high power part. Chipset TDP of the 65nm 4-series mobile chipsets are higher than 0.13u 945's.
And the 2.5W Atom used on the EEEPCs, the N270s are meant for "Netbooks". The Atom 230's which are meant for "Nettops" are 4W, and 330 is a dual core version of it.
It's 4W vs. 8W.
sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Remember the whole CMOS vs. GTL bus stuff. AND, the US15 has NO SATA on it. Kinda useless for the desktop.Of course the laptop variants will pull less power than the desktop variants, but the desktop parts should be cheaper.
Btw, with Zotac set to release an Intel 9300 Wifi mini-ITX board, why bother with Ion on the desktop? The current 7100 Zotac ITX board + 430 Celeron costs around $20 more than the dual core Intel Atom board, and the chipset on it runs at the same temps, 60c (that is, I replaced mine with a Zalman blue heatsink). It also gives you a pci-e x1 slot, DVI, better graphics, two slots for ram, and the fan on the Celeron is much quieter and unlike the fan on the Intel 945 chipsets, doesn't die (check out newegg.com for reviews of people 2 months down the road).
I've tested that board and it rocks. You do give up s video and gigabit eth, but the new 9300 board will fix all that with both DVI and HDMI, and will have a x16 pci-e slot.
sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Wait, I replaced the crappy useless heatsink fan combo on the Intel board. The Zotac board went as high as 90c while playing Portal, and didn't miss a beat.sprockkets - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Wait, maybe that whole no SATA thing was the GN40...Necrosaro420 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I dont get it, what is this?mobilecomputing - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - link
Its a graphics chipset that processes video so the main CPU doesnt have to as much cos the piddly little Atom processors cant take the heat. Not even the new ones http://news.idealo.co.uk/news/4844/intel-atom-n280...">http://news.idealo.co.uk/news/4844/inte...maller-c...Slash3 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Obviously, it is a watermelon.JTBM - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
I think for Ion it would great to see Bittorrent results. For example can it run Vuze (Azeorus)?mrsmegz - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Bitorrent clients would run extremely well on this machine even if it was clocked at 800mhz. Your bottleneck here is in your internet connection. Of course you could be planning to hide one of these tiny boxes under a floor tile in a server room at work.ssj4Gogeta - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
Azureus is a quite heavy application compared to other clients.