HP Mini 311: Netbooks get ION

HP Mini 311 — Flash Video Meets ION

We discussed recently the new 10.1 Beta of Flash, which adds DXVA acceleration for videos. We tested everything from standard YouTube and Hulu videos up through 1080p YouTube videos on the HP Mini 311. We even connected an external 1080p LCD to see how the system would handle scaling to such a high resolution. The results are shown in the following table (repeated from our Flash 10.1 article).

While Flash 10.0 struggled with quite a few videos, 10.1 enables ION netbooks (and nettops) to work without skipping. Presumably this will also help out any laptop/netbook with the necessary hardware to handle HD video decoding offload. That means that netbooks using the GMA 500 IGP ought to work (we couldn't confirm this yet), but most netbooks currently use GMA 950. The 945GSE chipset in this case can't help with DXVA, which means that fullscreen HD Flash video isn't going to run on such netbooks. If you like HD YouTube/Hulu/etc., that could be the killer app that makes the ION a must have compared to other netbooks.

Sounds great, right? Let's take a moment to look at the bigger picture, though. GMA 950 is old news… very old news. It's only still around because ASUS decided to make a slow laptop and sell it for $300, kicking off the netbook era. While we like the idea of smaller laptops with good battery life, Atom still leaves a lot to be desired, and the platform as a whole has plenty of shortcomings.

If you can manage to spend a bit more money, laptops like the Acer Timeline series include the much improved GS45 chipset (GMA 4500MHD) and Core 2 Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) CPUs. That combination is able to handle DXVA as well, and even the lower end dual-core Pentium SU4100 (1.30GHz 2MB cache) and Celeron SU2300 (1.20GHz 1MB cache) are significantly faster than the Atom N270/N280.

You can find such laptops starting at $400 (e.g. the Gateway EC1435u), and they make a very compelling argument against Atom netbooks. In terms of video decoding — be it Flash, x264, or something else — ION clearly leads other Atom netbooks but ends up tying the CULV solutions. Gaming would still be in favor of ION, perhaps, though it lacks the CPU power to make that matter. What about CUDA?