After an initial burst of enthusiasm and despite NVIDIA's repeated attempts to show me the light, I'm no longer particularly clear on the case for ION in netbooks—who are all of these people who are playing WoW and watching HD movies on their 1024x600 netbooks? Isn't "netbook performance" an oxymoron? Nonetheless, whatever the case is, it just got stronger with the announcement of ION 2.
ION 2 is pretty much what you'd expect given the Optimus announcement from early last month: an NVIDIA discrete GPU plus Intel's Pine Trail mobile platform. There are, however, a few twists on the idea that are specific to the netbook. First, let's take a look at the overall platform.
Like the notebook version of Optimus, ION 2 is essentially NVIDIA's response to a one-two punch by Intel: first, Intel moved the GPU into the same package as the CPU (in Pine Trail's case, they're even on the same die), and then the chipmaker refused to grant NVIDIA a license that would enable the latter to make a replacement I/O hub that interacts directly with the CPU socket.
NVIDIA has engineered their way around this lock-out by attaching their discrete GPU to Intel's I/O hub via PCIe, and including software that dynamically distributes graphical chores between Intel's integrated graphics processor (IGP) and NVIDIA's GPU. Because Intel's built-in graphics processors use system memory to store the frame buffer, Optimus's software side can hijack the frame buffer and use NVIDIA's discrete GPU to fill it. Intel's processor then reads the (NVIDIA-provided) display data from the frame buffer and sends it out to the display.
On Intel's normal laptop platform, this approach works great because the PCIe bus provides plenty of bidirectional bandwidth for Optimus to use for getting input from the CPU and sending output to the frame buffer. Pine Trail, however, is significantly more bandwidth-constrained, as it only hosts four PCIe 1.1 lanes. Most netbook makers will probably use only one of those 250MB/s lanes for NVIDIA's GPU.
Optimus can still push frames to a low-resolution netbook display over a single PCIe 1.1 lane, but one of the ION platform's big selling points is HD video output. For those who want to hook up an HDMI display to their netbook so that they can watch HD video, NVIDIA has attached an HDMI out that pulls data directly from the ION GPU's private, 512MB pool of DDR3 frame buffer memory. (Seriously, who hooks up an HDMI display to a netbook? This is not a rhetorical question. If you're doing this, please drop into the comments and sound off.) This added HDMI out is the main difference between ION 2 and the regular Optimus platform.
Another rationale for Optimus on netbooks is Flash video acceleration. This can be done on regular Pine Trail netbooks with a cheap Crystal HD chip from Broadcom, but NVIDIA is hoping that users will pay a little more to get the full Optimus experience.
The other part of the full Optimus experience is gaming, and, given my predilection for playing old cRPGs on a touchscreen tablet, I get this. An ION 2 netbook and a Good Old Games account would make for hundreds of hours of high-quality, impossibly cheap retro gaming. (If someone would make a dedicated ION 2 retro gaming tablet for under $400, I'd probably buy it.)
ION and ION 2 make a lot more sense in so-called "nettops," and NVIDIA has a variant on the ION 2 platform targeted directly at this market. In this version, all of the video out goes through the GPU. In fact, I'm not even clear on what, if anything, the Pine Trail IGP does in the nettop version of Optimus, since the platform's dynamic power/performance optimization isn't needed.
Acer, Asus, and Lenovo are among the netbook vendors that have already signed on to produce ION 2-based netbooks. NVIDIA is claiming a 50 to 100 percent performance advantage over previous ION systems, with minimal impact on battery life, so it makes sense that existing ION customers are moving to ION 2. Indeed, anyone who is already a satisfied ION customer will probably be itching to upgrade.
ION 2 is pretty much what you'd expect given the Optimus announcement from early last month: an NVIDIA discrete GPU plus Intel's Pine Trail mobile platform. There are, however, a few twists on the idea that are specific to the netbook. First, let's take a look at the overall platform.
Like the notebook version of Optimus, ION 2 is essentially NVIDIA's response to a one-two punch by Intel: first, Intel moved the GPU into the same package as the CPU (in Pine Trail's case, they're even on the same die), and then the chipmaker refused to grant NVIDIA a license that would enable the latter to make a replacement I/O hub that interacts directly with the CPU socket.
NVIDIA has engineered their way around this lock-out by attaching their discrete GPU to Intel's I/O hub via PCIe, and including software that dynamically distributes graphical chores between Intel's integrated graphics processor (IGP) and NVIDIA's GPU. Because Intel's built-in graphics processors use system memory to store the frame buffer, Optimus's software side can hijack the frame buffer and use NVIDIA's discrete GPU to fill it. Intel's processor then reads the (NVIDIA-provided) display data from the frame buffer and sends it out to the display.
On Intel's normal laptop platform, this approach works great because the PCIe bus provides plenty of bidirectional bandwidth for Optimus to use for getting input from the CPU and sending output to the frame buffer. Pine Trail, however, is significantly more bandwidth-constrained, as it only hosts four PCIe 1.1 lanes. Most netbook makers will probably use only one of those 250MB/s lanes for NVIDIA's GPU.
Optimus can still push frames to a low-resolution netbook display over a single PCIe 1.1 lane, but one of the ION platform's big selling points is HD video output. For those who want to hook up an HDMI display to their netbook so that they can watch HD video, NVIDIA has attached an HDMI out that pulls data directly from the ION GPU's private, 512MB pool of DDR3 frame buffer memory. (Seriously, who hooks up an HDMI display to a netbook? This is not a rhetorical question. If you're doing this, please drop into the comments and sound off.) This added HDMI out is the main difference between ION 2 and the regular Optimus platform.
Another rationale for Optimus on netbooks is Flash video acceleration. This can be done on regular Pine Trail netbooks with a cheap Crystal HD chip from Broadcom, but NVIDIA is hoping that users will pay a little more to get the full Optimus experience.
The other part of the full Optimus experience is gaming, and, given my predilection for playing old cRPGs on a touchscreen tablet, I get this. An ION 2 netbook and a Good Old Games account would make for hundreds of hours of high-quality, impossibly cheap retro gaming. (If someone would make a dedicated ION 2 retro gaming tablet for under $400, I'd probably buy it.)
ION and ION 2 make a lot more sense in so-called "nettops," and NVIDIA has a variant on the ION 2 platform targeted directly at this market. In this version, all of the video out goes through the GPU. In fact, I'm not even clear on what, if anything, the Pine Trail IGP does in the nettop version of Optimus, since the platform's dynamic power/performance optimization isn't needed.
Acer, Asus, and Lenovo are among the netbook vendors that have already signed on to produce ION 2-based netbooks. NVIDIA is claiming a 50 to 100 percent performance advantage over previous ION systems, with minimal impact on battery life, so it makes sense that existing ION customers are moving to ION 2. Indeed, anyone who is already a satisfied ION customer will probably be itching to upgrade.
source:http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/
