What appeals to me is the idea of a shoebox with eight TB worth of data storage running in a four TB raid 1 array and taking up just a tiny spot on a shelf somewhere making little to no noise.

I enjoy sharing my collections at lan parties, but don't enjoy hauling my Full ATX server around.

I'm sure if it can handle video playback it can handle file transfers at full gigabit speed, a emule client, and remote desktop.

So when will be seeing this at retail? I want....now!

This would do well under my TV with Boxee installed ;)

Susan Sarandon is way more attractive than Jessica Alba.

Also, I can't find power consumption mentioned anywhere in the article. At first, I thought derFunk was just being sarcastic, but then someone else talked about it like it was mentioned somewhere. I guess I'm just blind.

Finally, was there was some restriction on running Fraps to get the exact framerates or something? I would have liked to have compared some of the results to what I got with the Nano + 9400GT: http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=63600

I have a question I have yet to see an answer to:

With Quake Live coming, which uses an updated Quake 3 engine, how does this badboy run Quake3? I think it's semi-pertinent, and if I could have a 25w Q3/QL box, I'd be quite happy. Even just the 9300/9400 would be a good starting point.

Also, I am anxious to find out if the 9300/9400 are capable of running SC2 well...only time will tell, but from the rumors I've seen, it will be like Warcraft 3 was at the time, so not very demanding compared to contemporary hardware.

I agree with many of the posts I am reading here and have to wonder, what is the point or where is this going?

If I put a PC in my living room and hooked it up to the TV, I would want it to be able to handle some recent games.

If I want a low power computer for always-on services, I am not going to care much about its GPU power.

I can see the point of owning a netbook, but I wouldn't use it for gaming.

Beyond the netbook applications I am not sure I would choose to go with anything less powerful than a low wattage Athlon X2 or Pentium Dual Core.

So that means, to me at least, that this is essentially about gaming on netbooks, and that sounds just plain unappealing to me.

Having said all of that, if I was ever to buy a netbook, I would choose one with the Ion in it rather than one with the 945G in it, given that they were priced nearly the same.

This would be great for most business PC's. Throw in a 2gb memory stick and a dual-core Atom, and for $200 it'd be all you'd need.

Is there any chance of some performance numbers of the games when using dual channel memory? Or is it not possible to fit a second stick?

awesome power consumption numbers. ;)

With MS limiting XP to be on a netbook that does not have DX10, this doesn't seem to be aimed for that market unless will go right to Win 7 (September?).

Does anybody else think they should market the product the way it is? With its white box and everything.

I can think of a lot of uses for these box so please Nvidia and partners, please design a product that looks just like that please :)

This niche has always been filled for me with old PCs. I use my laptop (1.73M) as HTPC, and I also have an old Shuttle XPC with a 2.4ghz P4 and 9500 Pro AIW card. Granted I don't have a significant home theater. I don't see myself actually buying a new part to fill this need.

It's kinda nifty. The form factor is cool, but not enough to make a sale for me. If it was, I'd be a Mac user.

As nice as the Atom is in power draw, I'd LOVE to see the lowest clocked single or dual core Intel Core2 in one of these instead. Heck, even the ULV version that are in some notebooks would really run rings around the Atom.

The Atom is a nice chip (for what it does), but I'd much prefer to see a lower clocked, ULV version of the Core2 notebook chips in this and netbooks.

Charge the Atom and you get an Ion.
Flawless victory.

That looks cool. It would be nice to have full blu-ray support on something small and passively cooled. If somebody makes a board with that, DTS connect onboard, and a small PCI express slot for a tuner that would be pretty nice. The whole system could be powered by a small, cheap power brick and be about the size of the small/slim DVD players available now.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see the platform pop up in the next Mac mini refresh, but we shouldn't have to wait for Cupertino to catch on."

Take that back !

The Atom in a Mini would just add salt to the wound ! I mean, if Apple would sell such a mini for 200 - 300$, then yes, it would be acceptable but we all know that would never happen.

The Mini needs a proper C2D refresh not the sad excuse of a CPU that is the Atom.

Adi

What's the idle desktop power draw?

A large Atom board with a full complement of SATA ports and PCIe slots could make a decent low power draw home server. The graphics would be wasted in that case but the additional SATA ports would be its advantage. Of course who is going to make a large Atom board? Maybe Zotac will get smart like they did with their mini-ITX s775 boards only in the opposite direction.

I'm way out of the gaming loop, but how many of those games were designed with an eye towards the PS3 / Xbox 360?

Those games are more likely to take better advantage of the atom's second core.

Of course, the GeForce here would then be completely underpowered... swings and roundabouts.

Now fast-forward 5-8 years and see this kind of computer power on a smartphone. Yum!

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.

<Kent_Brockman>: And I've got to say "Ouch" for Susan Sarandon!</Kent_Brockman>

#30...Love the term WIN ROT...that's hilarious.

Hopefully users would be disciplined enough with their Atoms to not load them down with share/free/crapware.

How about MAC MICRO? I want 50 cent everytime somone uses it!

Wow, not bad at all. I may just buy one of these to replace my mother's P4 Celeron. She'll love the savings in space.

Can you send me the Ion demo box once you are done with it?

Thanks ;)

Not sure what the deal is, but something in the article is crashing my browser here at work. I suspect it's one of the Flash based ads.

Could you please test HD playback with 9400M more carefully? Mkv, ts and other packages; with PowerDVD 7.3, which opens files from hdd.. Than what is with 1080p @ 24fps and bitsream audio? Thank you!

Looks cool for a HTPC box.

Sorry nVidia, your Ion platform makes no sense. I'll be trading my Eee PC 1000HA for a GN40 equipped netbook--that will actually have lower power consumption than the poor old 945GSE/ICH7M combo.

Maybe if AMD and Intel could make amends we could have a 780G for Atom--even the old RS600 wouldn't be bad.

So, just a reply to several comments so far. This is not designed to go in a netbook I wouldn't think. This seems much more of a nettop type platform. It can do exactly what it was tested doing pretty well. Yes, why would you ever put this in a netbook indeed, thats not what its suited for.

Now, its not available, but I wonder if its possible to get ones hand on one of the engineering samples. :)...

Interesting design..

One flaw, that they could have addressed is the power draw. They are not targeting games. therefore they could have reduced the clocks and voltages on the platform.

Removed unnecessary PCIe lanes, maybe down to 4 or 8 (max). removed the dual channel memory controller, and remove one of the memory controllers.

If they could deliver similar performance such as playback at 1/2 the power that it currently uses, it would be a win. But right now it is just over powered for a processor that is used for low powered devices.

Granted still better then Intels solution, but if they really wanted a win with many manufacturers, they should concentrate on power (where intel has not - chipset wise).

But then Intel now has the possibilty to supply Atom with other chipsets, as there must be lower powered chipsets.

This platform is geared towards power usage and performance second. i just hope someone (the chipset manufacturers) will notice that.

Impressive but I was surprised that it's power consumption was so high, I thought that was the main complaint of the 945 chipset not the graphics (the GPU section I couldn't care less about).