VIA Nano 3000 to Fight Intel's Next Atoms
In the netbook space, Intel has a stranglehold on the low-power CPU choice with the Atom.
But it's not the only game in town. VIA since last year has offered the Nano CPU as an alternative, though it's not quite as energy miserly (but does come with more muscle).
Thus far, the Atom's been the processor of choice, but VIA today announced a new Nano that could change things. Now bumped up to the Nano 3000 Series processors, VIA's latest offering is based on the 64-bit superscalar ‘Isaiah’ architecture, which boasts flawless playback of high bit-rate 1080p HD video.
The VIA Nano 3000 also supports CPU virtualization technology, SSE4, and security capabilities integrated in the VIA PadLock Security Engine.
“With the VIA Nano 3000 Series, we are launching our fastest and most power-efficient processors yet,” commented Richard Brown, VP International Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. “Coupled with our market-leading digital media chipsets, they enable the richest experience across a broad range of mobile and all-in-one system designs.”
Available at speeds from 1 GHz to 2 GHz, Nano 3000 Series processors deliver up to 20 percent higher performance using up to 20 percent less power than current Nano processors.
The Nano 3000 Series processors should be easy to integrate into designs that already use the NanoBGA2 package, making them pin-to-pin compatible with a host of VIA processors, including the Nano 1000, Nano 2000, C7, C7-M and Eden.
VIA Nano 3000 Series processor samples are currently available for OEMs and motherboard vendors, and will enter mass production in Q1 2010. Hopefully we'll see some designs at CES 2010.
Making a toilet requires alot of concentration. Using one however...
They are going to try to beat the Intel 2chip solution with a VIA 3 chip solition?
I don't think AMD has too much money to get into anything else right now....
Can't see why it does... Nano is actually a pretty good CPU for it's market.
The problem is, what is the market? I got a fanless one, that ran at 800 MHz, and found my 400 MHz, underclocked K6-III+ outperformed it, and ran cooler.
Atom blows it away on low power benchmarks, and once you start moving up, you're often better off with an underclocked Celeron or Pentium based on the Core 2, as you get much better bang for the watt. They're products simply had no real market. They used too much power to compete with Atom well, and you'd have to clock them so low to reach Atom power levels, they couldn't compete in performance. But, once you start getting into where they could beat the Atom, then there was Intel's Core 2 line.
Considering Via is probably exaggerating, as companies always do, it's not clear if this will help them enough. They aren't that far off, so if they got 20% performance and 20% lower power use, they'd be very competitive, but it's probably 5% performance on most benchmarks, and 15% lower power. I don't think Centaur did enough. If it's just a revision, it's still impression. But, if this is their move to 45nm, it's a disappointment. Also, consider they still don't have a DX10 chipset.
On the plus side, the idle draw is down to 100mw, and the ultra low power version is 1.4 GHz instead of 1.3 GHz, so it's progress. But, Atom is improving soon, too. So, we'll have to see. I've always pulled for Centaur since their original Winchips, and thought they had a great idea and would be successful. So far, though, I've been nothing but wrong.
Not sure why it hasn't had an article or anything...
And wth? I'm running one of the Celeron 900 mhz and 1 GB RAM, with Linux Mint, and it's dying. So far I really haven't made ANY OS work decent on here. Irritating.
Toms did do an article on the AMD Athlon Neo, or rather the AMD Congo platform:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-congo-Ultrathin-Mobile-Platform,8634.html