Is Ion Nvidia’s last play?
Pondering Nvidia's future in PC gaming, and whether the Ion could truly be the graphics maker's best remaining play.
Just a few days ago, Nvidia announced its earnings for the most recent quarter and the figures did not look good: $147.7 million in losses; revenue down well over 50% from a year ago.
The performance end of the PC market where Nvidia tended to make most of its money is tanking, and Nvidia’s relationship with the console manufacturers is icy at best. With PC gaming slowly dying, I honestly can’t really see a major pickup in demand for performance parts, which leaves pretty much only core logic as a growth area for Nvidia (as well as potentially x86 chips, if the rumours are true).
Perhaps its best remaining play is Ion, an intriguing bundling of an Atom processor and the GeForce 9400M chip. It’s a platform targeted at “NetTop” PCs, and the demonstration unit Nvidia has built uses a Pico-ITXe motherboard that’s just 10cm by 7.2cm.
The GeForce 9400M gives the unit the graphics oomph to do high-def video decoding and even some decent 3D graphics, something which Intel’s own integrated graphics solution just doesn’t deliver on.
The key application I see for this is not portable Eee PC-alikes, for which there is little demand for better graphics.
It’s in lightweight media extenders, possibly running MythTV, Media Portal or a similar extensible application. If I could buy an Ion PC with a dual core Atom processor for a few hundred dollars, I would. Then I’d stick in the in the loungeroom, install Ubuntu on it and have a very cool media centre PC that didn’t take up much room and looked like it belonged in the living room.
Of course, for such a device to reach a wider market, it needs to be a little more plug and play than most of the previous attempts at media extenders have been.
There are a number of products that I’ve seen that have been intriguing, but are not quite there. It’s amazing to me that a hacked original Xbox running Xbox Media Center is still far and away the best media extender/network media player going (though it sadly doesn’t do high-def well).
If someone could bundle a compelling media software package with an Ion PC, then Nvidia might well have a winner on its hands – and a winner is something that Nvidia is desperately in need of.
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