Apple to adopt Nvidia's Ion

Tom's Hardware posted an interesting news article, which states that Apple will soon adopt Nvidia's Ion platform, rather soon. Could this claim have any ground to stand on?

This information was obtained from an unnamed Nvidia hardware partner so, as a whole, I'm still treating this as a rumor, more than a confirmation of anything:

An Nvidia partner confirmed to us that Apple was the first to receive samples of Nvidia's Ion platform, which we covered extensively during CES. In fact, Apple received prototype units long before Nvidia partners who opted to work on Ion.

This same article also suggests that Apple will use the Ion platform for both the Apple TV and the new Mac-Mini:

We had a discussion with Kasper at AppleInsider on this detail, and according to Kasper, Apple may be using Nvidia's Ion platform for an updated Apple TV. This seems highly plausable. At this time however, neither we nor AppleInsider are absolutely sure where Apple will be using Ion, but an Nvidia partner explicitly said Apple has Ion for Mac Mini.

Ever since I touched the Ion news report, I occasionally wondered if Nvidia was pushing the platform all by itself, risking to loose, probably, a decent amount of R&D and marketing money for nothing.
Intel has always had a way of stopping whoever wants a piece of it's turf. While Intel might have denied to be blocking Nvidia from selling 9 series chipsets to go with the Atom, that will never stop them of doing irresistible discounts on bundles with it's chipsets and marking an exorbitant margin on just the Atom.
Nvidia would have a bit of work to pull this off alone, throw Apple in the mix and it suddenly doesn't look so dangerous - the rumor might just end up true.


The Apple TV:

As you may now, Apple TV uses a dedicated GeForce Go 7300 and an Intel "Calistoga" chipset(something out of the 94x series) and an Intel "Crofton" 1GHz CPU. All together, this is expensive stuff. You have:

• The chipset, which also needs a southbridge
• An Intel 1GHz Pentium M based CPU at 1GHz(this picture shows it as an SL9YN, a Dothan if CPU-World is correct)
• A GeForce Go 7300, which is probably more expensive than the standard 7300 chip, due to more extensive thermal binning.
  

So, If I worked at Apple, I would be quite happy to throw away the pair of chipsets from Intel away and trade the other three for two cheaper ones(the 9400M is single chip) , still very efficient chips.
As far as the GeForce goes, the newcomer is even faster, has an updated video decoding engine, and supports CUDA. This alone would allow Apple TV to fully handle 1080p content, something that the current model can't. Apple's HD Quicktime videos seem to be using H.264, so using the embedded video engine with Quicktime shouldn't take much work.

The cost regarding the graphics part would also be lower. Apple would trade 256MB of DDR2 and 64MB of DDR3 for just DDR3(the 9400M can also use DDR2, although the Ion reference doesn't), which albeit more expensive now, will eventually get cheaper; if it wouldn't already be a cheaper solution than using two separate types of memory.

The use of a 330 Atom would also, by itself, allow for 1080p content to be played without much assle:

Video playback was smooth except for our VC-1 Coral Reef clip. The audio clipped throughout this clip even though CPU usage was relatively low. The problem stemmed from the fact that only a single CPU thread was active during playback — something that has not occured on previous tests using AMD X2 and Intel Core platforms. We are unable to explain why this occurred.

Both 720p and 1080p x264 clips played without difficulty. Slower single core machines are notorious for not being able to handle 1080p x264 clips, even using CoreAVC, so we're happy to report that a dual core Atom system is enough for such files.

There's only problems with VC-1, running single-threaded, a mere software issue then - there's four of them to use in an Atom 330, not one.
Even a 330 Atom uses just 8W max, so it's probably lower than the "Crofton" core, at a higher performance - reasons to be even less of rumor.

Still, a 330 seems too much power for this specific application. With 16 stream processors and a proper video decoding engine available in the GeForce chipset, a 230 would serve the Apple TV well. For this, the Ion seems not a rumor but a reality, soon.
All this could also be served in a smaller and cheaper form factor, for the reduced power consumption and less PCB space required.


How about the Mac-Mini?

This is a tougher subject. The Atom 330 has probably enough power for the average Mac Mini user but it's still significantly underpowered when compared to the current Core 2 Duo lineup present in the Mac Mini: with a choice of 1.83GHz or 2GHz CPUs.

If you look at the bottom of the article cited above for the 1080p tests on the 330, you can see that the PCMark test shows double the performance for the 1.83GHz Core Duo, ~4000 vs ~2000, and even worse for most video/audio enconding tests, around 2-2.5x worse.
Apple would definitely loose a big performance in the Mini due to this, the only tangible gain would come from the extra graphics power, the very big extra - as we all know, the 945G is, mostly, worthless. It's just too much performance lost for the price-point where the Mac mini lives in.

Apple has the future GrandCentral technology and OpenCL as major reasons to update all it's lineup to Nvidia chipsets, so at least a Nvidia chipset seems a certain thing for the Mac mini.

Mostly, this story seems just another rumor, or a misunderstanding. The Mini willl probably feature the chipset update (to the 9400 or 9300) but keep the CPU as a Core 2 Duo. It's either that or a price-point reduction coming hand-in-hand with the Atom 330(I really don't see the 230 here), although you shouldn't hope for miracles: Apple has always enjoyed fat margins.