NVidia has shipped out Ion Demo units to various lucky reviewers for benchmarking and evaluation.
The Atom’s antiquated chipset is clearly limiting the processor’s appeal for some devices, but help has arrived from Nvidia in the form of the Ion reference design. More a new application than fresh silicon, the Ion platform pairs the Atom with the very same GeForce 9400 integrated graphics chipset you’ll find on motherboards designed for Core 2 processors—except instead of arriving on a Micro ATX or Mini-ITX form factor, the Ion reference platform is about the size of a deck of cards.
So what does The Tech Report think?
One thing is abundantly clear about Nvidia’s Ion reference design: it’s much, much better than the 945G-series chipset and GMA 950 graphics that Intel typically pairs with the Atom processor. But that’s sort of like saying Jessica Alba is hotter than Susan Sarandon. The real question is whether the Ion platform actually makes for a more capable system without spoiling the Atom processor’s existing appeal. And the answer is yes.
They admit that the performance isn’t really up to gaming standards, but it’s more than adequate for Multimedia applications, capable of HD decoding easily.
