[mythtv-users] NVidia ION - Atom plus 9400M graphics on a box smaller than a toaster

[Robert Kulagowski]

I attended CES and saw the ION.  There were three on display, running 
Vista, and showing a number of demos.  One was a slide show, one was a 
helicopter shot of the Vegas strip video loop and one was a video of the 
MythBusters demonstrating a paintball gun drawing a smiley face and then 
a parallel version of the paintball robot that shot something like 300 
paintballs at the same time.  None of the videos exhibited glitches that 
I could see, and part of the slideshow was an image of the CPU 
utilization while rendering the video demo.  Pretty negligible.

The box really is small.  Just looking at the stuff on my desk, I would 
say that it's about the size of the 5-port Linksys SD205 that's sitting 
next to me.

The three that were on display were behind plexiglass, so you couldn't 
actually touch them.  They were running though, because one had crashed, 
and someone with small hands from NVidia had to reach in and reset it. 
When it was booting it showed that it was something like MC79 Pico VGA 
BIOS.  It went quick, so I didn't see much more than that.

Externally it had 2xeSATA, VGA, DVI, 6x3.5mm audio, and I believe there 
were 2 USB and a CAT5 connector.

There is a fan on the Atom processor - it looks like a 40mm, but I put 
my ear up to the plexiglass case near one of the "hand-holes" and didn't 
hear a jet engine.

I could see NVidia getting around the restriction of having to use the 
Northbridge by putting the 9400 on a mini PCIe daughterboard.  The DVI 
connector was at a different elevation than the VGA, and the cardboard 
cutout mockups of the motherboard they were handing out sort of implied 
that was a possibility.

NVidia said that they believe that vendors will have the units available 
in the summer.