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NVIDIA @ CES 2010: Recap

Shanee Ben-Zur — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:14:29 -0800

CES 2010 marked another milestone week for us, with the announcements of our next generation Tegra processor, 3D Vision Surround, Optimus and a major technological partnership with Audi...just to name a few.

If you weren’t at the show, below is a look back at our CES coverage, from start to finish. You can also check out our pictures from CES on Flickr. We’d also like to give a special thanks to former BusinessWeek columnist, Steve Wildstrom, for contributing his CES observations to the blog.

Optimus Primer – Rene Haas gives us a preview of a new NVIDIA technology.
ION @CES – Want to know what ION-powered products we showed at our booth?
Wildstrom @ CES: CES Netbooks - New Chips, Better Video - Steve Wildstrom talks netbooks and their future.
Surround Yourself with NVIDIA 3D Vision Technology – Now you can play on three 3D displays simultaneously for an even more immersive experience.
NVIDIA CES Press Conference - Liveblog – You can read the complete play-by-play of the press conference here, see photos, or you can also check out the videocast.

Tune Into Internet TV With the NVIDIA Tegra-Powered Boxee Box by D-Link – This award winning Internet TV device is powered by the brand new next generation Tegra processor.
Wildstrom @ CES: Smartbooks, Tablets Challenge the Netbook - Wildstrom examines the 2010 outlook for smartbooks and tablets.
How Silicon Valley Innovations Improve Driving Safety – Audi and NVIDIA are working together to bring new technology to the automotive industry.
Wildstrom @ CES: E-readers and Low-Power Displays - From the Que to the Nook, Wildstrom reviews the popular e-reader category.
Wildstrom @ CES: Time To Reduce Set Top Box Clutter – More technology has led to more clutter. So, what’s the solution?
Wildstrom @ CES: Ready or Not, Here Comes 3D TV – 3D was a major CES buzzword, including 3D on home televisions.
Wildstrom @ CES: Wrapping It Up—The Tech World Finds Its Groove - Wildstrom recaps the 3 most popular technologies he saw at CES, calling this the year that CES “got some of its old mojo back.”

As always, we’re interested in hearing from you, so let us know what you think in the comments, below.

Wildstrom @ CES: Wrapping It Up—The Tech World Finds Its Groove

Steve Wildstrom — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:27:40 -0800

Post Updated: 1/20/2010

CES got some of its old mojo back this year. The economy may still be far from healthy, the aisles of the Las Vegas Convention Center were jammed, the cab lines stretched to Hoover Dam, and there was energy and optimism behind the flood of product announcements.

Unlike the past couple of years, when the talk was all about content, CES 2010 focused firmly on products. Three categories seemed to dominate the buzz:

Netbooks and slates, oh my!

As has been the case for at least three years, The Company That Wasn’t There managed to loom over the proceedings. Apple still has made no public announcement, but it is widely expected to reveal its endlessly speculated about unnamed tablet before the end of January. Based on the rumblings from the industry, Apple seems to have spent as much time working on content partnerships for the tablet as it has on the hardware.

Lots of folks, from Dell and Hewlett-Packard to little-known Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers, showed off tablets for which no real use case has yet been made. They generally run Android or some other flavor of Linux, though HP partnered with Microsoft to show a Windows 7 concept. But no one seems to have much of an idea of what these little tweener devices might be used for. They remind me of the Mobile Internet Devices promoted by Intel with much fanfare and almost no success.

Netbooks, on the other hand, are very real. The big news here is Intel’s new Pine Trail version of the Atom processor platform. Early indications are that Pine Trail doesn’t do all that much for performance, but does deliver significantly better battery life. This should improve the tradeoff if Pine Trail is paired with an enhanced graphics unit, such as NVDIA’s Ion 2 (or whatever it will be called; I am not privy to NVIDIA secrets.)

Traditional notebooks were not neglected, however. Intel introduced its Calpella family of Core processors, which bring its 32 nm Nahalem microachitecture to mobile chips. Laptop makers are refreshing their products lines with Calpella, especially at the high end, and these chips are expected to bring a welcome combination of higher performance and improved battery life.

TV in depth

The television sets in your house are probably only a couple years old and you probably don’t think you need a new one. The TV industry hopes to persuade you with the next big thing, 3D television. Every major manufacturer demonstrated 3D sets at CES, and studios are readying a lot of 3D content, both in the form of 3D Blu-ray Disc movies and cable and satellite content.

Yes, you will have to use a pair of those geeky glasses to watch 3D. TV—displays that generate 3D without requiring glasses are in the lab, but are a long ways from being ready for the market. And the quality of the 3D images is variable. The best images, generally found in movies, approach a realistic three-dimensional picture. But all too often, you’ll see an image that seems to be arranged into several planes at different depths behind the front of the screen. This will probably improve as studios get better at 3D encoding—and the success of Avatar gurantees a flood of content later this year.

Readers, readers, readers

The success of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader and the maturing of the E Ink technology it uses has produced a glut of imitators of all shapes, sizes, and design from giants like Samsung down to companies you have never heard of. I suspect, however, that there is little or no point to most of these products. Kindle, with an indifferent hardware design, has sold much better than the arguably better Sony Reader because Amazon has surrounded Kindle with a brilliant infrastructure that makes it dead simple to shop for and acquire books. Barnes & Noble’s new Nook is similarly endowed. But I don’t think readers without this back end have much of a chance.

But two readers stood out, one a product that will ship in the spring, the other more of a concept. Plastic Logic’s Que, available starting at $649 in April, is aimed squarely at the business market. It has a huge screen, nearly 11 in.—but thanks to a new process that allows transistor to be printed directly on a plastic substrate, it is extremely thin and light. You will be able to buy books from Barnes & Noble and subscribe to newspapers and magazines, which will look far more like their print versions than on existing readers, from a number of publishers. There are also a variety of ways to load your own business documents, including the wireless dispatch of attachments from a BlackBerry.

The Skiff Reader, whose development was backed by Hearst Corp., is intended as a platform for digital newspapers and magazines. It too uses a new type of e-paper display, one developed by LG using metal foil. But at this point, the Skiff is just a preview, with no details yet on pricing or availability.

Former BusinessWeek columnist Steve Wildstrom is serving as a guest blogger at CES for NVIDIA, for which he is receiving compensation. The opinions expressed in his posts are his own, and not necessarily shared by NVIDIA.

Wildstrom @ CES: Ready or Not, Here Comes 3D TV

Steve Wildstrom — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:30:00 -0800

As I roamed the booths of the big consumer electronics companies at CES, there was absolutely no question of what they think the next big thing is: 3D television. Every TV manufacturer devoted a substantial portion of its booth to 3D demos, and I found they ranged from mildly interesting to very impressive. But I think it is going to be a while before 3D in the home becomes pervasive.

There’s no question there will be an explosion of 3D content this year. Hollywood studios were planning it anyway and the runaway success of Avatar guarantees it. The finalization of a 3D standard for Blu-ray Discs will make studio content available for home use. And by mid-year, cable and satellite TV systems will start experimenting with 3D broadcasts, even though only a tiny minority homes will have the equipment needed to display it.

I think there are three reasons why the ramp-up of home 3D will be relatively slow. First, the timing is bad. The economy, though improving, is still weak and consumers don’t have much inclination to make big durable goods purchases. And household have just completed the biggest replacement cycle for TV sets since the advent of color, as analog CRTs were replaced by HD flat screens. Most of those flat-panel sets have years of life left in them.

But there are also technological impediments. Probably the biggest is the need to wear those wonky glasses. There have been experiments with no-glasses-required 3D, but the technology isn’t close to being ready. It only works when the viewer is centered on the axis of the display and is located at a very narrow range of distances from the screen. These limitations might work for computer displays; they won’t do for TVs.

There are three technologies that require glasses, which an deliver a separate image to each eye, that do work. Anaglyph, a variant of those red and blue glasses from The Creature from the Black Lagoon is not being used with TV. Of the two remaining technologies circular polarization is cheaper, but active shutter is better. Active shutter, which is used in NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision adapter for PCs, the lenses are liquid-crystal units that open and close in sync with a 120-Hz. screen image, so each eye sees 60 frames per second. They work fine, even for folks who wear glasses, but make you look kind of weird in your own living room.

Then there’s the fact that the 3D images often aren’t all that great. The demos shown by TV makers tend to focus heavily on animation (especially from Pixar) for the simple reason that the inherent unreality of animation masks the lack of reality in the 3D.

The biggest problem with the images is what I call the View-Master effect after the old stereoscopic picture view. In real 3D as perceived by your eyes, that is, the everyday real world, the progression of rounded images from foreground to background is smooth and continuous. In 3D television what you see often looks more like flat images arranged in sevaral planes at different depths. It’s not awful, but it’s not really natural-looking. People working on 3D tell me this is to some extent inherent in the technology, but can be ameliorated significantly by careful encoding. To my complete lack of surprise, the best 3D I saw was from Pixar, especially in the trailer for the upcoming Toy Story 3. The worst was what looked like hastily converted video for a demonstration of Direct TV 3D.

The 3D process also seems to have a problem with rapid motion, especially in the “Z” direction toward or away from the viewer. I’m a little surprised that one of the first broadcast 3D efforts will be from ESPN, since real-time encoding of live sports action is likely to prove difficult. A recent 3D demo of 3D on the giant screens in Dallas Cowboys Stadium was a disaster; an angry crowd led stadium officials to turn the system off after a few minutes. Of course, the spectators did have a real 3D game down on the field to watch.

The one area where I think 3D will be an instant hit is gaming. Neither Sony nor Microsoft has announced 3D plans for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox, or their eventual successors. But you can get 3D gaming on PCs today with the GeForce Vision 3D kit. In addition to the kit, you need a PC with an appropriate graphics adapter and a 120 Hz. display.

Because of the paucity of 3D content at the moment, all of the manufacturers were showing mostly the same content in their demos, which made comparisons much easier. All of them were pretty good, but I though the best was Panasonic’s plasma displays using active-shutter glasses.

Wildstrom @ CES: E-readers and Low-Power Displays

Steve Wildstrom — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:15:00 -0800

E-readers took off as a hot category in 2009 and while the Apple tablet is a specter haunting the market, I think this category will be both commercially successful and will drive important innovation for a long time to come.

The most interesting new entrant is the Que Pro from Plastic Logic, announced Jan. 7 at the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s a large-format (10.7 in./267 mm diagonal) but very light reader aimed at the business and professional market. Although the display is based on the same E Ink “digital paper” used by the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Amazon Nook, and others, the technology literally underlying the display is radically different. The electronics driving the display are printed on a flexible plastic substrate and the entire display module, which is no thicker than a few sheets of paper, contains no glass. The Que Pro is not cheap, but not prohibitive for the professional target market. A 4GB version with Wi-Fi only costs $649, while the 8 GB model with both Wi-Fi and AT&T 3G wireless fetches $799. (The Que will be introduced in the U.S. only in April, but other countries will probably come along soon.)

The display for an e-reader poses very special challenges for designers, and E Ink is the best compromise available today. The simulation of black ink on white paper—it’s really more like dark grey on light grey—is easier on the eyes than reading a backlight LCD screen, as long as the ambient light is good. More important, the nature of the display consumes power only when drawing a new page and the image will remain stable, paper-like, when the power is removed. With the radio off, I have been able to use my Kindle for a couple of weeks of active reading.

On the other hand, E Ink has some very substantial limitations. Color remains a laboratory project and is probably several years away from commercial use. Fujitsu is selling a color reader called the FLEPia in Japan, which uses an E Ink-like display technology, but the colors are washed-out and murky. Screen redraws take an eternity by LCD standards, making the display suitable only for status text and graphics.

Still, Plastic Logic has done a lot to overcome the disadvantages of E Ink display. One problem with existing readers is that they render all text in the same, rather boring, manner. Plastic Logic worked with Adobe to allow for much richer typography that allows the creators of content, including commercial publishers, to preserve the distinctive flavor of their documents on the screen. This means that publishers can not only retain their branding through type (a phrase popularized by Adobe) but can use typography to replace color as a way to distinguish different parts of a document, a technique used for generations before color printing became standard.

The Plastic Logic transistors-on-plastic technology is not necessarily limited to E Ink; it can drive any screen type where pixels are manipulated by an active matrix of transistors. The company is not yet discussing plans beyond E Ink—it’s been hard enough to get that to market—but one possibility for the future is organic light emitting diodes. OLED screens are less power hungry than LCD, though still far thirstier than E Ink. They are also quite expensive currently only practical in sizes up to about 4 in., such as the display used on the HTC/Google Nexus One phone. Also, while the readability of E Ink improves as the ambient light gets brighter, OLED washes out in bright light and becomes all but unusable in direct sunlight.

A more distant color possibility is Mirasol, a new low-power display technology developed by Qualcomm. It is a dichroic process that produces color similar to the iridescence in a butterfly’s wings. Again the problem is cost and scale; current commercial Mirasol screens only go up to a couple of inches.

How Silicon Valley Innovations Improve Driving Safety

Mathias Halliger — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:36:07 -0800

The exponential rise in computing power in cars is improving safety while giving drivers more control than ever over their experience behind the wheel.

NVIDIA and Audi are harnessing this potential with the Audi third-generation multimedia interface, or 3G MMI, which employs a leading-edge NVIDIA graphics processor to better provide key data and media that drivers demand on their journeys. NVIDIA announced on the first day of the International Consumer Electronics Show that its processors will be used in all Audi models featuring 3G MMI technology in 2010.

The Audi 3G MMI system makes it far easier for drivers to use input destination commands by voice or searching for mobile phone contacts -- reducing the need to focus on a screen. When a screen is needed, the 3G MMI system utilizes advanced NVIDIA technology to provide high-quality 3D graphics, which make it easier to identify the surroundings of a destination and points of interest. The system also provides significantly more visual information, rather than text information so it’s easier to understand at a glance.

Most importantly, it allows those functions to be seamlessly integrated into the car, so that it’s more intuitive for drivers to find what they need and have it displayed in a way that doesn’t distract from their focus on the road.

Coming this fall, Audi will take the practical safety benefits of this technology to another level with the next-generation Audi A8 flagship sedan. The 2011 A8 features an Audi-exclusive touchpad that allows motorists to use their finger to trace letters and numbers, enabling them to search for a destination while keeping their eyes on the road.

The new 3G MMI navigation plus system in the Audi A8 will also enable the integration of Google Earth mapping and destination search. This addition under consideration for the U.S. market will provide the most up-to-date Internet-driven navigation maps available in the industry – an advance that reduces motorist confusion while driving to a destination.

Engineers from both Audi and NVIDIA are continuing to work on deepening the ties between Silicon Valley innovation and German engineering to deliver safer driving experiences.

In addition, the next generation NVIDIA Tegra ultra low-power HD mobile processors will drive the advanced entertainment and navigation systems in Audi vehicles starting in 2012-2013. Next-generation NVIDIA Tegra processors are architected to deliver rich 3D visuals, unmatched multimedia and a complete web experience on a variety of devices.

Tune Into Internet TV With the NVIDIA Tegra-Powered Boxee Box by D-Link

Bruce Chan — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:30:00 -0800

The Next Generation Tegra is designed to deliver a no-compromise Internet experience to a variety of devices. Among the new applications for Tegra are Internet TV devices, which allow consumers to view online movies, TV shows, music, photos, and the best of the web on a living room television, with no PC required.

The first Internet TV device powered by Tegra is the new Boxee Box by D-Link, which has already won a “Best of Innovations” award from the Computer Electronics Association.

The combination of Tegra, NVIDIA’s processor for the mobile web, and Boxee software introduces a new level of interactivity with the television. The Boxee Box allows consumers to select immersive HD multimedia content from the web at anytime, while doing so in a sleek form factor with quiet and smooth operation.

With Tegra powering the Boxee Box by D-Link, consumers can:

Easily navigate content from the Internet, their hard drive, or home network with an intuitive 3D user interface
Access the Web from the comfort of their living room using accelerated Adobe Flash Player 10.1 graphics and videos
Experience lightning-fast Web browsing with a dual ARM Cortex A9 running speeds up to 1GHz
Play 1080p video from locally stored content and stream HD video content from sites like YouTube
Stream crystal-clear online music from sites like Pandora with an enhanced audio processor

The Tegra-powered Boxee Box upgrades the television set with anytime access to all forms of entertainment, including eye-popping HD movies, concert hall-quality sounds from music streaming sites, or the chance to engage with others while their favorite sporting events are on.

If you’re at CES, stop by the NVIDIA booth in South Hall 4 #35912 to check out the Boxee Box by D-Link and see what happens when the Web meets TV.

More information on the Boxee Box by D-Link can be found at http://www.boxee.tv/box

NVIDIA CES Press Conference - Liveblog

NVIDIA — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:14:57 -0800

UPDATE: We've uploaded photos from the press conference to our flickr feed: http://www.flickr.com/nvidia

Today's the big day and we're at the Shimmer Cabaret, in the Hilton Las Vegas getting ready to start our press conference. For those who can't make it here in-person, we'll kick off the liveblog at 10:30 am PST or you can tune into the live audiocast on our CES site: www.nvidia.com/ces2010.

You can read the latest updates in the window below, or subscribe to the liveblog feed, here.

NVIDIA Press Conference @ CES 2010

Surround Yourself with NVIDIA 3D Vision Technology

Bryan Del Rizzo — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:48:39 -0800

There’s no denying the power of 3D. Theatergoers love it, and are buying tickets to 3D movies in droves. Gamers love it, as it allows them to become fully immersed in the artistic vision envisioned by the game developer. And like the powerful combination of peanut butter and chocolate, Jack Daniels and Coke, and macaroni and cheese, 3D and gaming are rapidly becoming must-have technology for gamers everywhere. For those who want only the best–and for everyone else who just appreciates cutting-edge technology–NVIDIA today announced its 3D lineup of what is on display at this year’s Consumer Electronic’s show (CES). From notebooks, to new high-definition 1080p LCDs, to Blu-ray 3D, PC-based entertainment has never looked better in 3D.

Here at CES, 3D TVs and Blu-ray 3D are big. I have no idea how expensive those new 3D TVs will cost , and I expect their price to be a barrier to entry for a lot of consumers. I spent a lot of money on building my own kick-ass home theater, and I’m not in any major rush to run out and replace my 61-inch DLP. What intrigues me however, is building a PC that can handle the task of running 3D Blu-ray, and provide a terrific platform for everything else you might want to do in 3D: game, view photographs, or browse the

Our 3D Vision is already the industry’s most flexible 3D solution for the home, and in 2010 it’s only going to get better.. As you may know, NVIDIA GeForce GPUs are able to handle the real-time decode of 3D Blu-ray content. You have to see it to believe it. It’s equal to or better than your 3D experience in the theater!

Of course, astute gamers may have noticed something called 3D Vision Surround mentioned in today’s release. Yep, that’s right... with 3D Vision Surround, now you can play on three 3D displays simultaneously, and span your entire game across all three panels for a totally immersive, rocking 3D environment. Of course, you can also use our Surround technology in 2D mode too, but why would you want to game in a flat environment?

And while 3D Vision Surround will be officially launched with our GF100 GPUs later in Q1, the good news for everyone is that 3D Vision Surround will also be supported on our GT200 family too! More details about 3D Vision Surround will be announced over the next few weeks, but we’re sure you’re as excited as we are to try it out.

We’ll be posting pictures from the show floor as soon as we get them, so stay tuned to this blog and Facebook and Twitter to whet your 3D appetite.

Thanks, and happy 3D adventures!

Wildstrom @ CES: CES Netbooks - New Chips, Better Video

Steve Wildstrom — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:00:00 -0800

Netbooks were a surprise hit in 2009 and the march of these diminutive, low-cost notebooks is continuing at the International Consumer Electronic Show, which opens Jan. 7 in Las Vegas. A big story this year is improving graphics performance, netbooks' most serious weak spot. A second story, which I will cover in another post, is the competition to netbooks that will come from even thinner and lighter “smartbooks,” which use neither Intel processors nor Windows.

Once upon a time, say a couple of years ago, providing a high-quality video experience was very low on the list of must-haves for designers of highly mobile devices. That is painfully evidence if you have tried to watch Hulu on most netbooks or view a Flash video on a smartphone. Both netbooks and smartphones were seen as devices primarily for Web browsing and email reading and designers will willing to sacrifice performance, particularly graphics performance, to achieve long battery life or reduce costs. If it was good enough to play a grainy YouTube clip, it would do.

This has changed dramatically with the explosion of high-quality online video and the desire of consumers to watch it on whatever device was at hand. A flock of new chips hitting the market is going to produce much better video on a variety of devices.

Netbooks, the diminutive laptops that became a surprise hit in 2009, are generally powered by Intel’s Atom processor paired with Intel’s integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950, a combo that provided marginal processing power from both the CPU and the graphics. Some higher-end netbooks addressed the problem by replacing the Intel graphics with NVIDIA’s Ion, a pairing that gave much better video performance at some price in battery life.

Intel has tried to address performance problems with a new generation of Atom chips code-named “Pine Trail.” (Pine Trail is actually the new Atom chipset platform; the CPU alone is confusingly codenamed Pineview. Early reports on Pine Trail are a bit disappointing; the processor offers improved battery life, but not much in the way of higher performance. One solution may be a expected successor to the Ion. Exactly how the Ion 2 (which may or may not be the real name; writing for an NVIDIA blog does not give me any access to inside information) will work is a bit mysterious since the Pineview CPU includes an integrated graphics adapter. More detail on Ion 2 should be forthcoming soon perhaps at CES.

The alternative method to better netbook video is the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder chip. It’s a more limited solution than Ion, but it does provide a better HD video experience than a straight Atom setup and is less of a battery drain than Ion. One word of caution: Claims of 1080p HD video for any netbook are meaningful only if you are connecting the computer to a 1080-capable display through an HDMI cable. Netbooks screens are simply too small to display 1,080 lines of video.

Netbooks are also getting some signficant software help. Windows 7 combines a much more operating system than XP, especially when it comes to wireless networking, without a sacrifice in performance. And Adobe’s forthcoming Flash Player 10.1 should be substantially easier on resources than the current piggy Flash 10.

ION @ CES

Ken Brown — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:00:00 -0800

It’s hammer time! We’re at the Las Vegas Convention Center where the NVIDIA team is busily unpacking crates and putting our booth together for the CES start Thursday. Before the doors officially open we wanted to give you a preview of what you can see at our booth related to ION (our award-winning graphics processor that transforms small PCs like netbooks into fully capable PCs).

ION Storm

We’re showing a number of ION-based PCs in our CES booth including the world’s fastest netbook, sleek all-in-one systems, and tiny nettop PCs. These PCs – from Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, and Zotac – all deliver a killer multimedia and HD video experience in a compact design. With full support for Windows 7 Home Premium, these svelte systems show that even small PCs can provide great graphics and entertainment with the help of a good graphics processor. If you want 10X the graphics performance, 1080p YouTube HD video, and Sims 3 on a netbook, choose ION. Standard “Pine Trail” netbooks are simply not up to the task^*.

Let me highlight three of the newest designs:

ION Netbooks

The ASUS 1201N is the world’s fastest production netbook. It provides a sweet multimedia experience with support for streaming HD video (using Adobe Flash Player 10.1), accelerated media conversion, and plays popular games like The Sims 3.

ION Nettops

Be sure to check out the new ASUS Eee Box EB1501 desktop system at our booth. This mighty mini combines ION graphics with a dual core Atom 330 CPU and adds great features like a DVD burner, Windows 7 Home Premium, a 250GB hard drive, and 802.11 b/g/n wireless.

ION All-In-Ones

A new all-in-one PC from MSI, the Wind Top AE2220, delivers great performance and versatility at an affordable price—who doesn’t like affordable? It’s sleek, fun and easy to use. The unit comes with Windows 7 Home Premium and rocks multi-touch on its 21.5-inch, widescreen HD display. The display supports full 1080p video thanks to NVIDIA ION graphics, and the unit has built-in HDMI in so it can double as an HD-ready monitor.

The Wind Top can also handle photo editing, video editing, and HD video playback, and it comes with either a DVD burner or Blu-ray drive. All for under $900. It’s a slam dunk for digital content fans and families who like to watch video or play casual games together.

We’ve got MUCH more in store -- stay tuned to the blog for details on other NVIDIA-based products we’re showing at CES.

^* - Based on 3DMark 2006 performance comparing NVIDIA ION with Atom 230 vs Intel GMA3150 graphics and Atom D410. Editorial sites like this one have shown HD video plays well on ION and not Pine Trail, and the same holds true for gaming.