So is the next-generation NVIDIA ION platform faster, slower, or about the same as the ION chipset found in notebooks such as the Samsung N510, Lenovo IdeaPad S12 and HP Mini 311? An early benchmark suggested it wasn’t quite up to snuff. But it turns out that test was performed on a pre-release netbook with the less powerful of NVIDIA’s 2 next-gen ION chips.

Now that NVIDIA has officially launched the platform and a number of new ION-powered devices are on display at CeBIT in Germany, the folks at Notebook Italia have had a chance to run a benchmark on the Asus Eee PC 1201PN. This machine features the new 16-core version of the next-generation ION chip.

And lo and behold, it did score better in the 3DMark06 benchmark than the Eee PC 1201N, a similar notebook with first-generation ION graphics. When I ran the benchmark on an Eee PC 1201N, I got a score of 1559. Notebook Italia reports that the Eee PC 1201PN scored 2013 on the same test.

The Eee PC 1201PN probably isn’t going to take on the Alienware M11x gaming ultraportable anytime soon. But it’s definitely a step above earlier ION-powered machines in the graphics department.

You can check out a video showing the Eee PC 1201PN in action after the break.

Update: Netbook News.de has the benchmark results using 3DMark03. The score? 4482. That’s noticably higher than the 3049 notched by the Acer Aspire One 532g with the less poweful version of next-gen ION.

via Netbooked

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NVIDIA has yet to officially unveil its ION 2 platform. But based on a series of leaks, announcements, and the fact that the Acer Aspire One 532g with next-generation NVIDIA ION made a surprise appearance at Mobile World Congress in Spain last week, here’s what we know: ION 2 is basically a GeForce GT218 that can be paired with an Intel Atomor other CPU to offer higher performance graphics.

It doesn’t matter if the CPU has integrated graphics, like the Atom N450 with GMA 3150 graphics, because ION 2 uses NVIDIA’s Optimus technology to automatically switch between integrated and dedicated graphics depending on the tasks you’re performing. In other words, if you’re playing a game or watching a high definition video, ION 2 kicks in. If you’re surfing the web and battery life is more important than graphics performance, you’ll rely on the integrated graphics.

But how does the next-generation ION platform stack up against the first generation ION chipset available in a handful of netbooks and nettops today? And how does it fare against the GMA 3150 graphics that come standard with most netbooks?

It’s a bit early to make any definitive judgments. But the folks at Netbook News managed to grab some time with the Acer Aspire One 532g with ION 2 graphics and they ran the 3DMark03 benchmark. The verdict? It scored a respectable, if not spectacular 3049. The Samsung n150, by comparison, scored just 704 points. Higher scores are better. They tell me that they used the same test on a Samsung N510 with first-generation ION graphics and it notched a score of 3513.

Again, these scores may be due to a variety of features, and not just the ION chipset. But if you were holding out hope that ION 2 was going to be significantly faster than the first generation, that doesn’t appear to be the case. The Acer netbook actually got a lower score than the Samsung N510.

But while bleeding edge games might give the Aspire One 532g some trouble, the mini-laptop should have more than enough graphical prowess to handle 1080p HD video playback and some 3D gaming. The exciting thing about ION 2 isn’t that it’s faster than ION 1. It’s the fact that it exists at all. When Intel decided to combine the GPU and CPU into a single chip, NVIDIA could have just decided to drop its ball and go home. Instead, the company figured out a way to bring discrete, switchable graphics to low end mini-laptops.

We should have more details soon, when NVIDIA is ready to make an official announcement. And I’m going to withhold final judgment until I’ve had a chance to test an ION 2 system or two myself… or at least until I’ve seen test results for a few more systems.

You can check out the benchmarking video, courtesy of Netbook News, after the break.

Update: TG Daily got a a response from NVIDIA, and it boils down to this: NVIDIA hasn’t officially unveiled its next-gen ION platform yet and has yet to talk about its performance. Oh yeah, and Sascha benchmarked pre-release hardware, so you know, there’s that. via Netbooked

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Credit: Laptop Magazine

Intel Atom powered netbooks typically have more than enough processing power to handle day to day tasks such as surfing the web, editing documents, or watching standard definition YouTube videos. But the integrated graphics solutions that come with these netbooks typically aren’t powerful enough to handle 1080p HD video, high definition Flash video, or hard core video gaming.

Of course, the simplest way to make sure you have a laptop powerful enough to do those things is to either shell out the big bucks for a high end ultraportable or buy a larger laptop that has a netbook-like price, but higher performance graphics and CPU options.

But there’s another approach that some netbook makers have been taking. NVIDIA and Broadcom both offer products that can enable higher performance graphics in one way or another on netbooks with Intel Atom processors. The NVIDIA ION solution replaces the integrated graphics with an NVIDIA graphics processor which adds support for HD video playback as well as the ability to play some video games and perform other tasks that take advantage of the more powerful GPU.

The Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator is a cheaper option which adds 1080p HD video playback capabilities, but which isn’t a full fledged GPU in its own right. Computers with this card still use Intel’s integrated graphics, but have the ability to tap the coprocessor when it’s time to display HD video.

So how do the two stack up against one another? The best way to test would be to take two machines that are identical in all ways except that one has the Broadcom card while the other has NVIDIA ION. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any PC maker that offers those two options on the same machine. But the folks at Laptop Magazine did the next best thing and benchmarked a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 with a Broadcom HD card against an HP Mini 311 with NVIDIA ION graphics. For good measure, they threw in a version of the Inspiron Mini 10 without the Broadcom card.

The results, as you can see in the graph above are pretty stunning. While the NVIDIA ION card outperformed the other two options in every test, the Broadcom card enabled 1080p HD video performance on the Dell laptop that would have been impossible without the card. And the difference between 59 frames per second and 48 frames per second is actually pretty insignificant, since your eye won’t notice the difference.

Of course, the Broadcom card doesn’t support video gaming. And the latest version of Adobe Flash Player doesn’t work with the Broadcom HD Video Accelerator yet, which means that HD Flash video isn’t support. But it should be soon.

While the netbooks of 2010 so far seem to wear a pretty standard uniform (1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 1GB of RAM, and at least an optional 6 cell battery), subtle differences can lead to differences performance. I mean, not so much in the CPU performance, but definitely in the battery life department. Case in point: NDevil has published a series of benchmarks of the HP Mini 210, and while it notched nearly identical scores to the Asus Eee PC 1005PE and Acer Aspire One 532H in 3D Mark, PC Mark 05, and GeekBench benchmarks, the HP Mini 510 with a 6 cell battery fell short in the battery life department.

Of course, just because the HP Mini 210 didn’t run for 10+ hours like the Asus Eee PC 1005PE doesn’t mean its battery is useless. In fact, it ran for 7 hours and 42 minutes during a web surfing test, which is pretty darn good when compared with most other notebooks on the market. It’s just that we’ve come to expect a little more of a machine with an Atom N450 processor.

PC Magazine

Intel’s new Pine Trail chips aren’t designed to be significantly faster than the Atom Diamondville chips we’ve been using for the last 18 months. They’re designed to be more energy efficient. As such, Intel has chosen not to launch a dual core version for notebooks. But as with the early Atom chips, the new Pine Trail series will offer both single and dual core processors for low power desktops, also called nettops.

And the folks at PC Magazine have run some of the first benchmarks on a nettop with the soon-to-be-widely-available Intel Atom D510 dual core CPU.

The verdict? It uses less power than the dual core Atom 330 Diamondville processor, but doesn’t offer significantly better performance. The test rig D510 chipset also appears to use more power than a computer with the single core Atom 230 processor, but that’s hardly surprising.

via Netbooked

3DMark06

I happen to find myself with a number of rather of interesting computers at the moment with a nice mix of the latest and greatest in low power, decent performance specs. So I spent much of the afternoon running benchmarks on the following computers:

• HP Mini 311 notebook with NVIDIA ION graphics and a 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU
• ASRock ION 330 nettop with NVIDIA ION graphics and  a dual core 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor
• Asus UL20A with a dual core Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo CULV processor and integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics

I ran three different sets of benchmarks on each system. These benchmarks are designed to test CPU and GPU performance. First up, 3DMark06, a widely used graphics benchmark that tests performance for rendering 3D video gameplay. It’s worth pointing out that none of these computers got particularly high scores on this test, but as you can see from the chart above, the two notebooks with NVIDIA ION graphics did significantly better in this GPU-intensive test than the Asus UL20A. Higher scores are better.

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I’m not a big fan of benchmarking tests like PCMark and 3DMark because I don’t feel like they give the average user a good idea of how a PC will perform in real-life scenarios. Over the past two years, this hasn’t been much of an issue because most of the laptops I’ve reviewed have been netbooks with Intel Atom N270, N280, or Z520 processors. In other words, they all performed pretty much the same.

Sure, there was the occasional Intel Celeron or VIA Nano chip thrown in for good measure. But for the most part, if you picked up a laptop with a 12 inch or smaller display for under $500 between 2007 and mid-2008, odds are it had an Intel Atom CPU. So I didn’t have to work that hard on the performance section of my laptop reviews.

Well, the times, they are a-changing. Soon Intel will launch its updated Intel Atom platform and it’s likely that we’ll start to see machines with Intel Atom N450, D510, and other chips hit the market. But more importantly, Intel is promoting its Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) platform for 11 to 12 inch thin and light laptops. AMD has its NEO line of processors. And we’re well past the days when a processor’s clock speed could tell you all there was to know about its performance.

So in order to help keep track of the new systems with processors like the Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300, Intel Pentium SU4100, Intel Pentium SU2700, Intel Celeron 743, and AMD Neo MV-40, I’ve put together a list of common CPU-intensive tasks that you might expect to do on a portable laptop. This includes transcoding audio and video files, copying a large number of files from one directory to another, and creating a zip file.

I’ve already used this method to test the performance of the Acer Aspire 1410 laptop (with Windows Vista Home Premium and a single core Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 CPU), and HP Mini 5101 netbook.

But since I probably won’t be able to test every single netbook and ultraportable laptop released over the next few years, I wanted to make my benchmarking tools available to the public. And it occurred to me that some of the files I was using in my tests were copyrighted and shouldn’t be distributed. So I’ve put together a new set of benchmarking tools which are available for download here.

Today I have results for the Asus UL30A, a 13.3 inch laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor.

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The HP Mini 311 is the first thin and light laptop with NVIDIA ION graphics to hit the streets in the US. HP has been showing the laptop off for a few weeks now, and it’s clear the laptop can handle 1080p video playback as promised. But what else can it do?

The folks at Laptop Magazine have been playing with a review unit, and they found that the machine scores well above any other netbook when it comes to overall performance and especially shines in video performance. In a blog post, Laptop compares the HP Mini 311 with not just netbooks, but other thin and light machines with Intel CULV processors including the MSI X340 and Asus UL30A.

The long and short of it is that the HP Mini 311 has a standard Intel Atom processor that isn’t going to win a ton of awards on its own. But thanks to the powerful NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, the Mini 311 trounces your typical netbook or CULV machine when it comes to video playback, video gaming, or the 3DMark06 benchmark. It also outperforms every netbook and some CULV powered machines in the more general PCMark05 test.

Laptop also found that the HP Mini 311 was able to transcode a video from AVI to MP4 about 5 times as fast as a typical Intel Atom powered netbook. Bear in mind, in order to do that you need to use vReveal, a video transcoding tool designed to take advantage of the GPU. Using other tools which rely on the CPU will yield much slower results.

The Intel Atom N280 CPU is showing up in more and more netbooks. The Asus Eee PC 1000HE, Acer Aspire One D150, and upcoming MSI Wind U123 all use the latest generation version of the Intel Atom CPU. It’s a little bit faster than the N270 that has been on the market for about a year. The N280 runs at 1.66GHz while the N270 runs at 1.6GHz. And the newer chip has a front side bus speed of 667MHz compared with 533MHz on the older model. But what exactly does that mean?

I’ve already shown that you can easily overclock the Intel Atom N280 processor to run at 1.75GHz on Asus computers. If you use third party overclocking software you could probably go much further. But the folks at ComputerMonger decided to pit the Intel Atom N270 and N280 processors running at their stock speeds against one another. The results? Yeah, there’s not a huge difference between these chips. But there is a little difference.

To make as close to an oranges to oranges comparison as possible, ComputerMonger used an Acer aspire One D150 with an N280 CPU and Acer Aspire One A150 with an N270 chip. The D150 scored a few points higher in a series of benchmarks. But the differences were pretty slim. The long and short of it is that you shouldn’t expect miracles from the Intel Atom N280 processor, or even a noticeable performance boost over the Intel Atom N270. We’ll probably have to wait for next generation chips or the NVIDIA ION platform which bundles the Atom CPU with an NVIDIA GPU for that.

People have been loading OS X on netbooks without Apple’s consent for a while now, and it turns out the operating system runs surprisingly well on many Intel Atom-powered mini-laptops. Sure, an MSI Wind U100 isn’t going to be able to outperform a MacBook Pro with a dual core CPU, but it turns out the Intel Atom N270 handles most tasks about as well as the PowerPC G4 processor in a 4 year old iBook. Or at least, that’s what AppleDifferent decided after running a series of benchmarks.

Basically, the test involved pitting an iBook G4 and a MacBook Air against an Advent 4211, which is a rebranded MSi Wind U100. In several benchmarking tests, the Advent 4211 outperformed the iBook G4, although it didn’t come close to touching the MacBook Air. In real world tests, the results were more mixed. The netbook booted OS X more quickly than the iBook, and launched programs faster. But when it came to CPU intensive tasks like unzipping files or applying complex image filters in GIMP, the iBook took the lead.

So what have we learned today? The Intel Atom N270 chip may have only come out half a year ago, but it’s about as powerful as a 4 year old processor. Which is no surprise, since that’s pretty much what Intel was going for. That’s why the Intel Atom line of processors is a lot cheaper than a Core 2 Duo CPU or other modern high performance chips.

via Blogeee