Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"NVIDIA’s Ion comes in as an alternative two-chip solution. The GeForce 9400M is a single chip, the other chip is the Atom, the two make up Ion. You get a modern memory controller as well, supporting both DDR2 and DDR3 memory (up to DDR3-1066). Graphics performance is better than Intel and you get full HD video decode support."

Anandtech has their hands on an NVidia ION reference platform and put the wee board through a quick set of benchmarks and tests. NVidia ION looks like it will give netbooks a chance to be more than a light duty computer. The pairing makes it possible to watch Bluray movies and play games, albeit with very low settings. Currently, Atom based netbooks run off of the aging 945G chipset. While capable, it doesn't take advantage of advancements over the past few years like faster memory. The tests Anandtech go through shows how much the Atom is hobbled with its current partner. Is the potential enough to make you wait on your ultra-portable purchase?

"NVIDIA has unveiled a new netbook platform that combines an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU with an Intel Atom CPU to dramatically boost graphics performance on low power machines like netbooks and nettops. We first heard that NVIDIA was working on something like this a week and a half ago, and now the company says machines built around the platform could be ready to ship in the first half of 2009."

Anyone that has a netbook or an ultraportable knows that Intel's integrated graphics, while capable for regular 2D applications, is really lacking when it comes to 3D performance. NVIDIA appears to want to change all of that, pairing a GeForce 9400M with the Intel Atom. The 9400M is still classified as an IGP, but it performs considerably better than any solution from Intel. Supposedly, this new marriage won't drain any more power than an Atom/GMA 950 pairing as well. The only disappointment is that it will add a noticable price jump to netbooks. The great benefit I see from all of this is that even the humble netbook will be capable of 3D performance. Sure, it won't match a high performance rig, but it means that developers can work on applications knowing that 3D and powerful media capabilities are available.

I was reading a post over on jkontherun about MSI hiking the price on their Wind notebook, and on the Mobius discussion list we had a discussion about the way prices have been going up, and up, on all these new "cheap" notebooks. I've been noticing the same thing over the past year - Asus has been inching up the price tag on their EEE PCs with each new revision (and they never even hit their originally announced price of $199 USD), and certainly most of the new players out there are coming in a a higher price point. It's a huge mistake to abandon the $299 price point because as long as the most basic of functionality is there (Web browser + wireless) that's all some people need. I'm pleased to see some slightly larger, more full-featured notebooks coming out though, because I'm personally willing to pay more than $299 to get enhanced functionality. In fact, the $599 version of the HP Mini Note bothered me not because of the price, but because it didn't have a CPU powerful enough to play DVD-resolution video and the battery life was sub-par.

The seemingly obvious point that most OEMs seem to be missing is form-factor matters for some people more than price. It's not like HP already had a laptop the size of the Mini Note in their line-up, and the $499 price point was the only interesting thing about it. No, they introduced a whole new size of notebook and while some consumers will buy only on price, others (albeit a smaller number) will buy on form factor and functionality (many of the people reading this site for instance). Because if I want a small, 9" screen device, it's not about price for me - I'm not going to buy a $499 clunker laptop because the form factor is wrong. I'd pay $999 for a device that small that had great battery life, a great keyboard, and could double as movie playback machine. In fact, I've paid $2500 for such a machine in the past: the Fujitsu P5000 and P7000 laptops I've owned.

Ultimately I think a two-pronged approach to this market is going to unfold: you'll have someone taking the $299 price point (and lower) market, and you'll have someone offering the more expensive ($399+) products that offer more laptop-like features. I think the market needs both, but the lower price point is where the greater sales volumes are going to be. I hope the manufacturers of these devices figure that out.