ION 2 slower than ION 1?

[ToTTenTranz]

Googlish:

What I have heard from Barcelona? The benchmark results from the new Acer Aspire One 532g with Intel Atom N450 and additional graphics chip from Nvidia fall out loud Sascha plenty disappointing.
When testing with 3DMark03, the system reached just thin rubber 3049 points!
Current-N450 netbooks achieved with integrated Intel GMA3150 graphics, although only 704 points, but I would have hoped for from the GeForce GT218, which will be installed here as Nvidia ION, much more.

(...)

PS Only for comparison: With the Samsung N510 and Ion 1, we have reached 3513 points in 3D Mark 03.

Source.


While the new ION 2 (basically, a GT218 with 16 shaders) uses dedicated DDR3 memory (so it should have higher bandwidth), in communicates with the CPU/NB through a single, 1x PCI-Express lane.

This single lane factor could be choking the system's performance, and it's not something that nVidia can solve, since this is a limitation from the Pineview architecture.
I heard rumours that nVidia would be overclocking this single PCI-Express lane, but it doesn't seem to be making to much of a difference.

The GPU in ION 1 was in the northbridge, so it connected with the CPU at much higher speeds.



So it doesn't matter how powerfull the GPU in future ION systems can get, the single lane bottleneck will render it inefficient.
I guess this could very well mean the end of nVidia's netbook history.

The only thing nVidia has left is to apologize to VIA and use the ION 2 with Nano CPUs, if these will ever get relevant design wins.

 

[ChewyBrownSuga]

I guess i will never get my dream of having a netbook that can play games on med/high

 

[ToTTenTranz]

I guess i will never get my dream of having a netbook that can play games on med/high

There's the 11,6" Alienware M11x for ~$900 with a 48-shader GT216 (Geforce GT335M).
Also, if you don't mind connecting an external box with a separate graphics card, the Acer Ferrari One can be connected to a mobility HD5870 (desktop HD5770), so you'll have all the GPU mojo a laptop can get.

 

[ChewyBrownSuga]

Well my birthday is right around the corner and i really want to be able to game on the run (like at school ^_^)

Maybe Ati will enter the netbook world

 

[angelkiller]

<snip>.

This is nothing new. This was discovered as soon as Pine Trail was released.

ION exists primarily to allow Atom to play HD content. Not gaming. Even with ION, gaming on ION still isn't very feasable. Intel saw this and responded quite well. They added the support of that Broadcom decoder so that you don't need to have a complete graphics core just for HD video. Much more power efficient.

ION 2 is nothing more than adding a graphics card (GT210) to Atom.

I guess i will never get my dream of having a netbook that can play games on med/high

No, you won't. Netbooks are made to be low cost laptops. ION was a good fix to Atom's inability to play HD content. But it was a band-aid solution. It has no future. Atom was not meant to be a gaming platform and adding a powerful GPU to a really slow CPU doesn't make sense.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

This is nothing new. This was discovered as soon as Pine Trail was released.

ION exists primarily to allow Atom to play HD content. Not gaming. Even with ION, gaming on ION still isn't very feasable. Intel saw this and responded quite well. They added the support of that Broadcom decoder so that you don't need to have a complete graphics core just for HD video. Much more power efficient.

ION 2 is nothing more than adding a graphics card (GT210) to Atom.


(...)

No, you won't. Netbooks are made to be low cost laptops. ION was a good fix to Atom's inability to play HD content. But it was a band-aid solution. It has no future. Atom was not meant to be a gaming platform and adding a powerful GPU to a really slow CPU doesn't make sense.

Why do some people think that playing a videogame is some kind of ritual that must involve high-end hardware?



I played lots of great games in my EeePC, 3D games and all. I've been using my Ferrari One for lots of LAN parties. I do have a +3GHz quad core with a HD5870 at home, where I play the latest games with all the bells and whistles, but I don't refuse to play games in lesser machines.
I know I can have a great gaming experience outside my 24" 1920*1200 monitor. 2D and older 3D games are still fun to play, if they were good games from the start.
Heck, my DSi has a crappiest-ever 100MHz ARM11 cpu and I still have loads of fun playing Mario Kart with my friends.



So please, cut the "it's not meant to play games" crap.
There are no mystical boundaries forbidding users from playing games with a weak machine.
CPUs aren't made exclusively for surfing the internet or typing in wordpad, they're made to perform calculations. What each person does with the computing abilities is everyone's choice.

 

[newtekie1]

I'm sure the fact that the N450 is a single core Hyper-Threaded, and the N510 is a dual core had nothing to do with the higher score...

 

[ToTTenTranz]

I'm sure the fact that the N450 is a single core Hyper-Threaded, and the N510 is a dual core had nothing to do with the higher score...

The Samsung N510 has an Atom N280, which is your vanilla single core Atom.
The only netbook with a dual-core Atom is the Asus 1201N.

So don't you rolleyes me!



However, Fudzilla said somewhere that there will be two ION 2 and this was the slower version. The faster version could actually be marginally faster than ION 1 (which is mediocre to say the least).

 

[newtekie1]

Either way, even ION 1 was held back by the CPU.

 

[DonInKansas]

You're worried about 3DMark scores on a friggin netbook?

 

[angelkiller]

Why do some people think that playing a videogame is some kind of ritual that must involve high-end hardware?



I played lots of great games in my EeePC, 3D games and all. I've been using my Ferrari One for lots of LAN parties. I do have a +3GHz quad core with a HD5870 at home, where I play the latest games with all the bells and whistles, but I don't refuse to play games in lesser machines.
I know I can have a great gaming experience outside my 24" 1920*1200 monitor. 2D and older 3D games are still fun to play, if they were good games from the start.
Heck, my DSi has a crappiest-ever 100MHz ARM11 cpu and I still have loads of fun playing Mario Kart with my friends.



So please, cut the "it's not meant to play games" crap.
There are no mystical boundaries forbidding users from playing games with a weak machine.
CPUs aren't made exclusively for surfing the internet or typing in wordpad, they're made to perform calculations. What each person does with the computing abilities is everyone's choice.

I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't game on Ion. I was responding to the person who wanted Ion to be able to play games on med/high settings and I think that's unrealistic with Ion. I hate the saying, but "it is what it is". If Ion meets your needs, great. Just don't expect it to be a fire breathing gaming machine, because it wasn't designed for that. But it it's acceptable for what you want. Great. If it's not, it wasn't meant to be.



(DS rocks! )

 

[ToTTenTranz]

Either way, even ION 1 was held back by the CPU.

Actually, it was quite a balanced system.

 

[newtekie1]

Actually, it was quite a balanced system.

Not really, the 9300 boards which were basically the same as the ION graphics showed significantly better performance even with just Celeron Dual-Cores compared to the Atom 330.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

Not really, the 9300 boards which were basically the same as the ION graphics showed significantly better performance even with just Celeron Dual-Cores compared to the Atom 330.

Of course they show better performance. Bottlenecks aren't binary, they're progressive.

But MCP79 + dual core Atom is a balanced system, nontheless.