Nvidia ION2 – poorer performances than the first generation

Although Nvidia hasn’t officially announced the Ion2 platform yet, we’ve seen the first netbooks built on it, the Acer AO532G devices. And the folks at netbooknews.com managed to benchmark one of these new gadgets displayed at MWC at Barcelona last week.

Being a new generation of dedicated graphics for Atom powered netbooks, we expected quite some improved performances from the Nvidia Ion2. Especially since they announced it will be a lot faster than its predecessor. However, that’s not actually the case.

Surprisingly (or not), the tested Acer only scored 3,049 points in 3DMark03 (see the video below) . And that’s pretty poor, considering Samsung’s N510 scored nearly 3600 and the HP Mini 311 scored around 3450 points on the same benchmark (both with the older generation Nvidia ION LE). Disappointing.

But how is this possible? We know that Intel’s Pine Trail platform uses the DMI bus to connect to the processor and NM10 chipset. However, Nvidia can’t create chipsets that work on the same DMI bus, as they lack the license for it. Thus, the dedicated graphics interfaces with the rest of the platform via the slower PCI-Express line. Thus, a bottleneck is created that keeps performances at bay.

However, as the ION2 platform will get closer to its official launch, we should see improvements, thanks to some improved drivers from Intel and Nvidia. Still, the hardware limitation will remain, thus no matter how powerful the graphic card you’ll attach to the Pinetrail platform will be, performances will only be able to go up to a certain level. Hopefully, that level will be higher than it is now on the early implementation on the AO532G.

Source: netbooknews.com (via netbook choice)

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Tags: Nvidia Ion 2, Nvidia Ion LE

Last updated: September 29, 2011 | Published: February 22nd, 2010 | Add the first comment!