ION platform was all that NVIDIA employees at CeBIT were talking about and when we took a closer look it was obvious why. As you can see from the pictures this platform has miniature dimension with lot of connectors and great possibilities. Power consumption of this system should be around 20W which is low if you take into account what it can deliver. This platform is powered by Intel Atom CPU so platform application is very wide. Till now combination of 945 chipset with higher power consumption didn’t have similar possibilities especially when it comes to HD video reproduction and gaming. Main difference is in support for HD video reproduction since NVIDIA chipset has support for hardware video reproduction acceleration. For connecting to HD TV HDMI 1.3 and optical SPDIF connectors are present. Monitor can be connected thanks to DVI and VGA connector while external storage can be connected thanks to 6 USB ports that are also present.

We saw presentation of gaming possibilities of this platform. Call of Duty 4 was runnig and under minimal settings was playable but this platform isn’t gaming oriented. 3D acceleration is included as support for operating system functions. As it is the case with most new product from NVIDIA, ION platform also has support for CUDA so it is possible to transcode video files on this platform. With Badaboom software speed of video transcoding from 1080p HD to Bold format (480x320) was between 24 and 30fps while on the same configuration without CUDA is has below 1fps. One of the best news is that all this shouldn’t cost more than 300€. Although we didn’t get information from NVIDIA when we can expect these to appear on the market, Acer announced that we could expect first samples signed by Acer in April.

Second important focus point in “greens” camp was GeForce 3D Vision: effect of depth when 3D is displayed on 2D display. If you are interested in this you will need NVIDIA IR receiver, wireless glasses, monitor with 120Hz refresh rate and of course software that supports all this. Effect is similar to effect of watching 3D movies in movie theatres but without those funny blue/red spectacles. We tried this new technology few times and all that has a lot of potential. Nevertheless we didn’t like that resulting depth is not smooth but rather gradual (stepwise), so is looks like background of the picture has several layers. We had problem with price of all this because it should be around 450€ but then again monitor is included in price. Also we would like to test this system on more than one game and see effects of prolonged usage.