Ion platform overview

If you aren't immediately familiar with the GeForce 9400 integrated graphics chipset, it first arrived in October last year when Nvidia finally announced the GeForce 9300 and 9400 'motherboard GPUs' after a number of delays. The original plan was for Nvidia to get the desktop version of the chipset out on the market long before the mobile version, but they both turned up on the same day.

Apple was first to announce adoption of Nvidia's GeForce 9400M in its new unibody MacBooks and it was the first of a number of manufacturers to adopt the chipset. Along with Apple, the list of manufacturers shipping GeForce 9400M enabled devices includes Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, Samsung and Toshiba and Nvidia says that more will follow.

The 9400M chip is essentially the same as the desktop version, although it is obviously binned for the lower power requirements of notebooks and netbooks. It packs 16 stream processors which run at 1.1GHz along with four texture units and four ROPs running at 450MHz – these are significantly lower than the desktop GeForce 9400 integrated graphics chipset’s clocks, which are set at 580MHz core and 1.4GHz for the stream processors.

Even more confusing is the fact that the GeForce 9300’s clock speeds are also higher than the GeForce 9400M’s – the stream processor clock is 100MHz higher on the desktop chipset. Frankly, we’re not quite sure where the nomenclature came from for the GeForce 9400M, but given Nvidia’s recent track record the confusion doesn’t come as much of a surprise – just don’t ask us why.

A key feature touted by Nvidia is Ion’s ability to accelerate high-definition video decoding up to and including high bit-rate 1080p Blu-ray movies. This is thanks to the GeForce 9400M’s integrated PureVideo HD decoding engine, which offloads most of the decode process for video streams encoded with the popular h.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1 codecs. Nvidia says that the only tasks it doesn’t offload from the CPU are those associated with copy protection and it claims that Atom is up to this task.


While Blu-ray and high-definition video playback are not tasks you’re likely to associate with netbooks, an increasing number of laptops (of all sizes) are shipping with an HDMI port to allow the user to connect their notebook to their high-definition TV. The fact that the GeForce 9400M is able to decode HD video and most Blu-ray movies with just a single-core Atom processor wants us to believe that netbook manufacturers using the Ion platform will include at least an HDMI output on their designs – and if they’re listening, please don’t skimp on this!

On top of HDMI (and HDCP of course), the GeForce 9400M also supports dual-link DVI, D-SUB and even DisplayPort, giving netbook and nettop manufacturers a chance to offer a wide range of connectivity options. There’s also support for 7.1 high-definition audio which, for those of you with a decent home theatre installation, can be outputted over HDMI in uncompressed LPCM – this makes Ion an incredibly attractive option if you’re looking for that low cost, low power and small form factor home theatre PC.

Obviously, the GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chipset is more than just a graphics core though and Nvidia hasn’t skimped in any particular area. For example, there’s a full complement 20 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes and five PCI slots should a manufacturer want to create a fully fledged Ion product with support for an add-in graphics card. The memory controller is also fully featured as well, with support for both DDR2-800 and DDR3-1333 memory, although the Ion developer box we have supports only 1,066MHz DDR3.

Keeping the feature rich trend going, there’s a full twelve USB 2.0 ports, six SATA II ports (with support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5) and native Gigabit Ethernet. This is more than you’re ever going to see on any netbook or ultra small form factor desktop machine, but what it does do is give manufacturers plenty of chance to differentiate on features – something that can’t be said about many of the current Diamondville-based netbooks and nettops.

Interestingly, despite the GeForce 9400M being as capable as it is for a device of this class, its power consumption isn’t particularly high. Indeed, Nvidia claims that the GeForce 9400M consumes just 1W more (3W idle, 9W load) than the current 945GC and ICH7 chipset combination (2W idle, 8W load) used in all Diamondville-based devices.

Even though this doesn’t sound like a lot, it does amount to 50 percent and 12 percent higher power consumption at idle and under load respectively at the wattages we’re talking about. Nvidia understandably plays this down, saying that typical battery life from a three cell 24 watt hour battery would drop from three hours on a Diamondville device to two hours, 40 minutes with Ion. Moreover, Nvidia claims that the additional capabilities enabled by the GeForce 9400M are worth the ‘slight’ battery life reduction – only time will tell if that proves to be true and these figures are quite likely to be best case vs. worst case.