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Nvidia Ion in general....why not an Atom cpu and an Ion GPU?
Nvidia has been sending out their review units with Blu Ray movies ripped to the HDD with no copy protection (AACS) so there's much less CPU overhead since no decryption needs to be run in the background. Once you actually put a drive in a system you'll see that a dual core Atom is what you really needed for playback.http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/28/acer-aspirerevo-review/
In that review is an acer revo with a atom 230 processor. In their testing 1080p movies still played fine (so they say). They only complaint is that flash video didn't play well. Which i can see, but if you use something like xbmc, which will play the flv file with mplayer, not an embedded flash player, hopefully everything will be ok. VDPAU acceleration works in xbmc for linux - and the nvidia atom platform will take advantage of that.
If you look at the pics you see that the external BD player is larger than the entire acer box - effin crazy.
what is it like 8 watts of TDP for the GPU and the CPU?
Another thing that will kill performance is going with one memory stick You need dual channel memory enabled for Blu Ray playback.)
CPU is 8w i think... surely its not that low, some of the test systems are 40+ watts during use.
Is this a joke ?
This is incorrect, also incorrect, is the assumption that you need tons of memory in your htpc... Mine has 1g, and plays everything i can find in windows 7.
Last I checked that is exactly what Nvidia said of it's reference Ion design. That stuttering happens here and there (with disc playback) because of the single channel DDR3 memory configuration.
Nvidia has been sending out their review units with Blu Ray movies ripped to the HDD with no copy protection (AACS) so there's much less CPU overhead since no decryption needs to be run in the background. Once you actually put a drive in a system you'll see that a dual core Atom is what you really needed for playback.
(Several previews/reviews had issues playing back a retail Blu Ray disc, they all used a single core Atom. Another thing that will kill performance is going with one memory stick You need dual channel memory enabled for Blu Ray playback.)
DDR3 ?
Ahh, do you have a linky? I just assumed they were using optical media in their review since the first pic shows an external drive hooked to the unit. I guess right now I don't have a 1080p display and would store everything on my media server anyways. But yeah, why even have a question in your mind if the system can handle certain content.
The site I read that from ran into the same issue and asked Nvidia about it and their response was that it was due to the single channel of DDR3 used in the reference system.I tried enabling both cores on the Atom processor (NVIDIA shipped the Ion reference with a dual-core Atom 330, but with one core disabled) to see if that could alleviate the CPU utilization concerns. Unfortunately I seemed to have run into an NVIDIA or Cyberlink software issue because I couldn’t get smooth Blu-ray playback on Ion with both cores enabled on the Atom 330.
So yes, based on that I'm very willing to say that if you want to connect a SATA Blu Ray drive to it you'll need a 330 for disc based playback. Anand also mentioned that Nvidia has been sending out review units with a scene from The Dark Knight ripped to it and from all the newer Ion reviews it seems they're still doing this.We took our Casino Royale Blu-ray disc and ran it through AnyDVD HD. We ripped the disc and copied the resulting ~46GB ISO to the Ion’s hard drive. We didn’t have an external Blu-ray drive so this was the best method of being able to watch a Blu-ray on the machine.
As expected, hardware acceleration worked. Casino Royale was encoded in H.264 and the Ion platform decoded it flawlessly. CPU utilization was high averaging between 40 - 50% on a single-core Atom machine with Hyper-Threading enabled:
There were some scenes where the CPU utilization peaked to over 90%. While we didn’t see any dropped frames, keep in mind that we’ve already decrypted the disc; the CPU is actually doing less here than if we were playing a Blu-ray disc directly from a drive. I suspect that playing back encrypted content it is possible for the Ion platform to drop frames if CPU utilization jumps out of its comfortable 40 - 50% average.
... You haven't read anything on Ion since it's introduction? The reference system that Nvidia has been sending out (before actually systems like Acer's showed up) uses a single DDR3 stick, laptop memory.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3499&p=1
The reference design... something you cannot purchase... is applicable to the end consumer like me in what way ?
Because it's still an indicator of performance. Seriously? You think Ion performance exists in a vacuum? It's going to be pretty much the exact same hardware (Ion supports both DDR2 and DDR3 so it's up to the OEM to implement it). I said there were some issues with the reference system that NV has been handing out, a handful of performance issues that have also been noticed in retail systems.
What's your point?
I was going to post the same thing, but them I remembered your title and figured you would do it.
Because it's still an indicator of performance. Seriously? You think Ion performance exists in a vacuum? It's going to be pretty much the exact same hardware (Ion supports both DDR2 and DDR3 so it's up to the OEM to implement it). I said there were some issues with the reference system that NV has been handing out, a handful of performance issues that have also been noticed in retail systems.
What's your point?