Intel's N470, AMD's 890GX and Nvidia's Ion 2: Something Borrowed, An Interface Breakthrough, And Something Old But Lamely Labeled New

The opening-day kickoff of CeBIT in Hannover, Germany predictably brings new product announcements from the biggest semiconductor suppliers to the PC industry. Intel’s news is fairly muted, at least so far; notably, the company yesterday announced a minor speed bin bump to its Pineview generation of Atom CPUs for netbooks, from 1.67 GHz in the initial N450 variant to 1.833 GHz in the newest N470. The TPD (thermal design power) specification has proportionally increased from 5.5W to 6.5W; all other characteristics (512 KB cache, HyperThreading capability, DDR2 memory speed bin support, packaging, etc) remain unchanged from the N450, and pricing is unknown.

Given Intel’s long-expressed desire to differentiate netbooks from notebooks, such a scant core clock speed-up is to be expected, and further near-term increases should not be expected. DDR3 memory support is sooner-or-later likely, however; perhaps that’s what the so-far unannounced N455 and N475 supply. Keep in mind that the Pinetrail series also includes the higher-power D410 single-core and D510 dual-core CPUs for entry-level desktop (nettop) products, and that next-generation handhelds will be serviced by Moorestown, an application-tailored design that serves as the successor to today’s Silverthorne.

AMD rolled out its 890GX core logic chipset, initially showcased on Gigabyte’s GA-890GPA-UD3H motherboard. As Anand points out, the bulk of the innovation is in the south bridge portion of the IC suite; the integrated graphics core is largely unchanged from that in prior-generation 7-series chipsets. Near term, the big news here is two-fold:

• 6 channels’ worth of 6 Gbps SATA support, and
• Partway-there USB 3.0 support

The former feature will be of greatest benefit with SSDs (solid-state drives), whose fast random read speeds will make optimum use of the latest-generation storage interface’s potential. And the latter feature addresses the fundamental USB v3 shortcoming noted in last November’s admittedly controversial editorial, that being the lack of pervasive platform support. By ‘partway’, what I mean is that the USB3 controller from NEC or another supplier is still discrete, although AMD provides two southbridge-baed PCI Express x1 lanes that are ideal for controller tethering purposes, and the SB850 also doubles the north-to-southbridge bandwidth versus the 7-series chipsets’ link speed. Long term, by the way, the 890GX (and Gigabyte and others’ motherboards based on it) are queued up to support AMD’s upcoming six-core Phenom II CPU, which the ’server spins’ sidebar of my recent feature article alluded to as a ‘desktop-PC-targeted variant of its six-core, 45-nm Istanbul server processor‘.

And what of Nvidia? As expected, the company formally unveiled its Ion 2 IC for cost-optimized systems, a chip whose existence I most recently mentioned a week ago. As expected, it’s a PCI Express-based graphics processor several silicon ‘hops’ away from the system CPU and thereby requiring a dedicated frame buffer, not a core logic chipset with integrated graphics (and leveraging system memory as its frame buffer) as with the first-generation Ion (aka ‘the last gasp of Nvidia’s nForce efforts‘). Interestingly, it’ll come in a single consumer brand name with two unspecified feature variants, one with 8 shader cores for 10" netbooks and another with 16 cores for larger-screen netbooks and nettops (the latter presumably the basis for the ‘10x faster graphics’ hype). And like its peers in Nvidia’s current product line, it still doesn’t support the DirectX 11 API found in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

So what we’ve basically got here is a neutered-shader variant of Nvidia’s existing 45 nm GPUs, delivering incremental battery drain versus a Pine Trail-only configuration (but thankfully less than might otherwise be the case, courtesy of system-level usage cognizance and subsequent dynamic on/off switching).

And delivering an incremental bill-of-materials cost drain, too; Nvidia estimates that Ion 2 presence will add at least $50 to a system’s price tag. To which I respond, with tongue firmly in cheek; good luck with that. You’ll snag a few low-volume premium netbook design wins, along with the same sort of small-form factor desktop and home theater PC, barebones system, and motherboard designs that Ion showed up in. Heck, you might even find a few homes for Ion 2 as an entry-level graphics add-in card. And I suspect Apple will use Ion 2 as the next-generation GPU in at least some of its upcoming systems (though I wonder what price Apple negotiated, therefore what if any profit Nvidia will eke out). But Ion 2’s not going to appreciably counteract the corporate funk that you’ve been in the past few years.