It will be moot with the next gen Atom because the IGP is on the same die as the CPU. It will be cut out from the 300 mm wafer.

Intel Atom plus GMA == $25

Intel Atom Stand alone == $45

Intel is fighting nVidia adoption anyway they can. Too bad AMD had to put themselves in a tough place by buying ATI. This seems pretty much like a dirty trick any company with an upper hand would do if they wanted to undercut the competition.

If we think about this though and I know that even if Intel Atom’s price dropped from $45 to and I am being optimistic here, $15, we are talking only $30 dollars. However, with some markups that happen along the way, we could make some significant cuts to the cost of the Ion setup and possibly become competitive with the larger setups like you have demonstrated here George.

Also, having the extra CPU power may be necessary if you want to serve files over the network at maximum speed at around 600 Mbps.

Yes, it’s a niche product and that’s exactly the reason why it doesn’t have the best price/performance ratio. It still has its applications with only a few alternatives on the market.

Where there’s room for mATX and silent active cooling I’d personally always prefer something with enough CPU horsepower to decode HD in software (Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2), since support for chipset hardware decoders is rare. I’m using XBMC on my HTPC, for example, and it doesn’t support hardware acceleration yet. My HTPC still plays the infamous "birds" sample smoothly on an X2 5400+ and a Gigabyte 780G board, a combination currently retailing at $125 on newegg. It admittedly draws close to 80W at the plug under such loads (including 2 SSDs, 1 HD and WLAN). That doesn’t bother me much as the output device draws around 300W .

15W PoE using the 945GSE + single core Atom is possible. The platform TDP is 7 or 8 watts I believe. When they integrate the 945 into the CPU package, it will be roughly the same TDP. The 945GC TDP would be too much for PoE.

You were also suggesting a few months ago that it would be possible to run a complete Intel Atom solution on Power over Ethernet. I wonder why you’re now estimating board and cpu alone to exceed that margin by 10W when idle.

No question that Intel IGP drivers have had big problems, but it’s gotten stable at this point in time. NVIDIA on the other hand never bothered fixing the relatively new 7050 chipset for S3 suspend, and that is a show stopper for me.

The 35W Conroe-L definitely needs a fan, but the G45 chipset doesn’t need a fan. The Atom doesn’t need a fan, but the NVIDIA 9300 used in the Ion may need a fan or the chassis has to be designed to blow a lot of air on to the GPU heatsink.

The Conroe-L system might peak at 50W more power consumption than the Ion platform but we can probably get it to idle at around 35W (or less) whereas an Ion system will idle at 25W (if you use a good DC power supply). So most of the time the system power difference will be around 10W. I’m not kidding when I say 35W because I’ve gotten dual-core Core 2 systems down to 38W idle.

So eventually those two platforms will be at price parity. Given price parity, Ion isn’t bad at all. Here is why:

8W Atom 330 + 12W Ion gives you a 20W platform power solution
2.5W Atom N270+ 12W Ion gives you a 14.5W platform power solution
35W Conroe-L + 24W G45 + 4.5W ICH10R gives you a 63.5W platform power solution. (41.5W difference so far)

The Atom solution will give you a 50W power savings assuming 80% efficient PS. Not much to brag about, still enough to notice. 35W Conroe probably needs a little fan to cool, while 8W Atom is completely silent. I would also rate the Ion IGP over the G45 IGP for better driver support. Intel’s IGP drivers have been crap. (I have a X3100 based laptop that used to have memory corruptions due to the X3100 IGP)

The Celeron does give you more CPU horse power.