The first Ion-based netbooks are beginning to trickle in, so yesterday Nvidia took the opportunity to introduce the technology to us formally. And if there was any doubt as to the focus of the demo, it was quickly made clear by the presence of a gigantic 1080p Sharp Aquos TV with a tiny netbook attached.

The netbook in question was HP’s Mini 311, announced today, and it offers a very similar core spec to others we’ve already seen from the likes of Samsung. The usual 1.6GHz Atom N270 and 2GB of RAM are joined by an 11.6in 1,366 x 768 LED screen and that shiny new Nvidia Ion GPU, which also allows manufacturers to include an HDMI port for hooking up to an HD TV. The Mini 311 is pencilled in for a £349 launch price, which is actually a rather competitive price for its size and spec.

We’ve played with Ion before in an Atom-based nettop and were extremely impressed by the results, but it’s still a bit of an odd experience to see the same intensive video tasks being carried out by a humble netbook, and output on to a monster screen. And just in case we couldn’t tell how impressive it all was, we were shown all of the demos side-by-side with a current Intel netbook.

Better performance

First up was simple playback of a 1080p H.264 video trailer, which unsurprisingly ran in WMP without a stutter on the Ion while its Intel equivalent jerked all over the place. The single-core CPU ran at around 40-60% load throughout. Mainstream gaming is also an option, as Call of Duty 4 running smoothly at a low resolution showed; our rep suggested The Sims 3 and Battlefield Heroes as examples of Ion’s level, so don’t expect Crysis just yet.

Next, demonstrating Windows 7’s drag-and-drop GPU-accelerated conversion via Nvidia’s DirectCompute, a two-and-a-half minute H.264 video trailer (at around 150MB) was dragged to a Sony Walkman media player to begin the transcoding process.

Nvidia claims a five-fold increase in transcoding speed when using the GPU. Accepting that the estimated Windows file-copy times aren’t the most reliable of figures, this test appeared to be even quicker: the Intel device estimated a massive 60 minutes, compared to less than three minutes for the Ion.

Higher quality

And the HP netbook had another trick in store, coming pre-installed with ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre 3 software and SimHD plug-in, capable of using the Ion GPU to accelerate the upscaling of video playback. Obviously these netbooks don’t come with DVD drives, but it’ll work with any file on your hard disk.

As for the real-world effect, it was quite clear that it was an upscaled clip rather than native HD quality, but with only a little bit of noise it made a positive difference on such a large TV.

The final, big reveal is unfortunately embargoed for the time-being, but it’ll be a game-changer for watching video online when it arrives. We can’t say anything about it until October, so keep an eye out.

And that was that. Ion is the breakthrough that gives every netbook manufacturer the cue to revamp their product lines, and – after the last few months of the same tired Atom-based clones boring us to tears – it simply can’t come soon enough.

We’ll be getting the first samples in the coming weeks, and they’ll undoubtedly prove the netbook has already evolved. No longer just an Internet device, it’s now a very capable media player too.