NVIDIA Ion – Intel Atom Done Right?

Sisoftware Sandra 2009 SP3

SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP3 (the System Analyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. A number of benchmarks were run using SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP3, so let’s take a look at the results.

Running the processor arithmetic benchmark shows the true performance of the Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz processor. The Dhrystone ALU performance was 4GIPS while the Whetstone iSSE3 performance was 3.36GFLOPS. This is just slightly faster than the Intel Atom N270 benchmark reference shown in the benchmark.

The single 2GB DDR3 1066MHz memory module obviously runs in single channel mode, and as a result has a memory throughput of roughly 3GB/s, which is a far cry from the leading triple channel desktop platforms that can reach beyond 30GB/s.

The Ion reference platform uses a SATA notebook hard drive and the system being benchmarked uses a 200GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 hard drive (ST9200420AS). This SATA-300 hard drive was found to have a random access time of 16ms and a drive index score of 49.26MB/s.

The GeForce 9400M is capable of running CUDA and GPGPU applications, so I ran the GPGPU processing benchmark to see how the Ion reference platform scores. The benchmark results showed the native float shaders at 32MPixel/s and the emulated double shaders at 2.33MPixel/s.

The DX10 Video rendering test showed similar results with the float shaders scoring 24.7MPixel/s and the double shader performance at 2.62MPixel/s.