Compromises
So what did NVIDIA have to do to adapt a fully-fledged notebook IGP and tailor it for netbooks? "This is exactly the same product as you find in the new MacBooks," said Haas, adding that the only adjustment needed was to do with the lower FSB of the Atom.
"This can potentially be used in netbook replacements, but it can also be used for higher priced thin and light notebooks. However, it would be no problem to use this in an 8 inch netbook."
Surely there must have been some compromises on power and performance. "The TDP [thermal design power] is in the 12 watt range, giving the total solution a power draw of 16 watts, compared to 12 watts for existing Atom solutions. And for that you get ten times the performance."
What about Atom? Surely the full capabilities of the 9400M are inhibited by such a low power CPU. "There's not much of a bottle neck with the current single core Atom compared to the dual core notebook CPU - approximately 30 percent lower on 3d Mark," said Haas.
"An Ion system can do full HD playback without skipping and still not have full CPU utilisation. Apart from decryption the GPU does pretty much everything."
Another potential hurdle might be the fact that Intel currently sells Atom to OEMs together with its own chipset. We asked Haas if he anticipated this being a problem. "There are a lot of the different ways in which Intel sells Atom and the chipset. Ion is so competitive that OEMs will ask Intel to provide them with the right solution," he said.
"There were no technical issues in making that happen and partners were very interested. We can't announce any specific partners yet, but the reaction has been fantastic."
Here's a photo of the Ion platform, with the 9400M IGP positioned next to the smaller Atom CPU, on an NVIDIA "Pico-ITX" reference platform.
