It's been a long time since we've previewed a VIA chipset. And yet, here we are with an S3-based DX10 GPU that VIA claims is ready for gaming. How does the VN1000 compare to Intel's Atom and Nvidia's ION? Is it strong enough to ward off Core i3?
It seems like AMD and Intel have always been the only two players in the CPU game, battling each other for market supremacy through price wars and technological advancement that continue to make their parts ever-denser and more power hungry. That hasn't always been the case, though. And it's actually not even the case today.
Intel took a big step in the direction of efficiency by killing its Pentium 4, but many of its newest parts still push more than 100 W under load. It seems that every time a new competitor steps out with something interesting, Intel is right behind them with its foot on the accelerator. Further limiting this game is the fact that Intel owns the x86 instruction set, and isn’t ready to issue any new licenses.
Yet there was one other company (besides AMD) with an x86 license, back from the days when IBM had the power to force Intel to sell them. VIA bought Cyrix and turned what had been a mediocre desktop CPU into a highly-successful low-energy part. A few generations worth of improvements later, and VIA is ready to re-enter the desktop market with a high-frequency dual-core version of its popular Nano processor.

With a pre-production CPU clocked at 1.80 GHz, the Nano DC (dual-core) platform that arrived in our lab is more a testament to the company's ingenuity than a representation of production-ready hardware. Yet, VIA is confident in the CPU's performance as it waits on its manufacturer to supply a die-shrunk version. Moreover, it wanted us to see what it’s doing with IGP graphics. Today’s article isn’t just proof-of-concept for a CPU, but an entire platform with a DX10.1 integrated GPU expected to lay waste to low-energy competitors.
VIA flew out from Taiwan to hand-deliver this sample to our lab and reminded us that it was still around, alive and kicking. Will that tenacity carry over into entry-level computing success? The company has had almost an entire year to polish up this platform, which was announced in December of 2009. Let's see how it fares in today's much more competitive market.
- A New Player In The Desktop Game?
- VIA’s Preview Platform
- Competing Platforms
- Test Settings
- Benchmark Results: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
- Benchmark Results: Crysis
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 2
- Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Media Playback And Performance Scaling
- Energy And Efficiency
- Conclusion


nVidia was late to market with GTX460, but given it's price point a lot of pressure was put on ATI.
Technology seems to be the one thing in which the underdog third-party can't seem to do better. =[
nVidia was late to market with GTX460, but given it's price point a lot of pressure was put on ATI.
However, when the new shrunken processor arrives, I think Tom's should also include netbook-like tests. These low-energy platforms aren't meant to encode videos or apply 100 photoshop filters to a terabyte tiff. The atom was specifically built to reduce cpu overhead (it doesn't even have out-of-order execution). Maybe toss in a ulv i3 if you can scrounge one up. So ya, I'll be waiting.
Pretty decent low end performance... if the drivers were up to the task. But they're not.
The shipping product needs to be rock solid if Via wants to overcome the suspicion.
5 bucks cheaper but doesn't work... is not the way.
Yet rather than brag about what could be a performance leader in the low-energy class, VIA calls this a "mainstream desktop" solution. I think they need to rethink the marketing on this.
The thing i would look for was movie playback and in that arena it's not exactly a show stopper. With that platform i'd be most concerned with if it can play full 1080p movies and flash particularly flash playback. then i'd look into power consumption etc.
Really these low power solutions are meant for cheap media playback or cheap workstation solution.