Intel Downplays ION, NVIDIA Refutes Their Claims

If there’s a fierce rivalry to ever take the proverbial cake, is has got to be Intel vs. NVIDIA. Both companies have been at each others throats for quite a while now, so when you hear one say something less-than-ideal about the other, it’s hard to know what to believe. The latest issue that’s arisen comes courtesy of Intel, who is trying hard to downplay NVIDIA’s ION platform (which we took a thorough look at here).

According to a document seen by Bit-Tech, Intel is warning their customers about NVIDIA’s supposed exaggerations about what ION can do. This includes jabs at ION for utilizing a chipset that’s both not new, and riddled with issues, while also poking the fact that the ION cannot completely handle HD playback (which it mostly can – the document refers to Tech Report’s article where they said that 1080i content had issues, but 1080p did not).

There’s a lot more to it than that, so I recommend you check out the article there. Since that was posted, Fudzilla has received an official response from NVIDIA regarding Intel’s latest document, and they refute pretty much every claim by Intel. They mention that the graphics power of ION is 10x of what Intel can produce, and that their MCP79 chipset has been picked up by many vendors worldwide. Regarding power consumption claims made by Intel, NVIDIA says that reviewer units didn’t have any power management in place, hence the slightly higher power draw.

One thing’s for sure… this is one heck of a messy duel. The truth is that right now, Intel’s platform exists, while NVIDIA’s is still en route. Intel plans to follow-up with an updated version of their platform later this year, which apparently gives NVIDIA a short “window of opportunity”. Either way, I’m still looking forward to ION, and despite the fact that we haven’t had one in our labs yet, we’ve been very impressed by what we’ve seen in our private meetings with the company. We’ll report more on this story as time goes on.

As well as this, Intel has also taken Nvidia’s claims about the Ion’s benefits over Intel’s own Atom platforms. In response to Nvidia’s claims about HD video decoding, Intel says that “Intel offers full Hi-Def video decode with HW acceleration with the off-roadmap Mobile Intel GN40 Express Chipset.” The company also refers to an article on the Tech Report, saying that “Preliminary press reviews indicate Nvidia’s Ion HD playback may not be as good as Nvidia claims.”