Nvidia EcoBook is a DIY Project, based on the Pegatron Cape 7 mini PC using Intel Atom CPU and Nvidia ION chipset with the goal to turn one of these multimedia systems into a book and put it along other books on the shelf. The result is a good-looking and “invisible” multimedia computer system for the living room that you can connect directly to your big HDTV and browse the net, watch HD videos both online and offline and even play games that are not too demanding. In the video you can see a comparison with a commercially available PC – the AOpen MiniPC, but that one uses integrated Intel graphics and a normal mobile Intel CPU instead of a low power and energy efficient Intel Atom processor. Note that the EcoBook PC seems to be using dual-core CPU, but actually that is because of the HyperThreading support resulting in two logical cores seen by the OS and the processor being physically a single core. The recommended Os to install and use with this PC is Windows 7, because of the available GPU acceleration built-in directly in the OS that can take advantage of the GPU performance that the integrated GPU in the Nvidia ION chipset has to offer. The 750GB WesternDigital Blue hard drive is not the typical height of 9.5 millimeters for a mobile HDD, but instead is 12.5 mm, but that is not an issue with this book design as there is enough space and having 750 gigabytes of space in such small size PC is great. The Pegatron Cape 7 has 1GB of integrated RAM, but it is good to add 1 GB more for achieving optimum performance not only for the system, but for the GPU too as the GeForce 9400M-like integrated graphics uses shared system memory for its needs.

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There are a lot of Nvidia-based video cards out there with support for the CUDA technology, over 150 million worldwide according to the company, but these cards do have very different parameters. Starting from GeForce 8×00 series Nvidia has added support for the CUDA technology, even for the low end GPUs and these, although not offering that much processing power, are still able to take advantage of the GPU acceleration that can be achieved thanks to this technology. But the problem you might face using CUDA-enabled software is not the speed you’ll get – this of course depends on the GPU power, but is related to the amount of video memory your video card has. If you are going to put your CUDA capable Nvidia-based GPU with a software that can take advantage of the technology in order to accelerate the processing speed of something you’ll also need more memory. For instance if you are going to work with Full HD video or other high-resolution audio video material you’ll probably need more video memory available in order for the video card to process all that data.

One recent example of bumping into a problem with not enough video memory available to process certain things with the help of CUDA was when I was testing the muvee Reveal 8 software and wanted to use CUDA on HD quality video, but on a lower-end GPU with a limited amount of video memory. Here is what I was able to achieve as output quality in terms of resolution depending on the amount of video memory available for the GPU using CUDA acceleration for the video encoding process:

- 512MB VRAM – 720p and 1080p resolution
- 256MB VRAM – maximum 960×540 resolution
- 128MB VRAM – maximum 640×360 resolution
- 64MB VRAM – CUDA option was not available

And these was on the same not very powerful GPU that uses shared video memory – Nvidia ION (GeForce 9400M class) with just 16 stream processors and with the help of a single core Intel Atom processor running at 1,6 GHz with HyperThreading enabled. So the capabilities of the GPU in terms of the output resolution were not limited by the number of the processing elements inside the GPU, but on the amount of video memory it has available…

So just as an useful advice for you, if you are planning to use your Nvidia video card for CUDA acceleration and want to take full advantage of the features available to you by the software you better go for at least 512MB of video memory, even if the GPU is not a high-end one!

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Trying out the new Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease version on a Pegatron Cape 7 (NVIDIA ION-based PC with a single core Intel ATOM CPU). The 720p videos from YouTube are played back great, thanks to the new DXVA acceleration in the player utilizing the video card for H.264 decoding, even the 1080p videos remain watchable, but while watching Full HD videos the system is nor very responsible as you can see. Still if you have an ION-based Nettop or Netbook you should definitely try out Flash 10.1 and if you have a dual-core Atom you’ll probably won’t have any kind of issues with the playback of 1080p videos…

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