Finally, VIA Gives the Intel Atom Some Competition!

Low power lovers for lots of years looked to VIA for solutions for small spaces, or for single use PCs, such as those that might be used for a SmoothWall router, or a small home server.

When Intel released the Atom processor, the world forgot about VIA for awhile, seeming  to be helped by the almost total absence of VIA mini-ITX solutions offered.

Now, there is, once again, some competition, and though Intel is coming out with a new series of Atoms, many will still choose the VIA offerings, due to the greater variety of auxiliary hardware found on the boards themselves.

Tech Connect has some hard data about the coming models, which should prove interesting, as they seem to take on Intel in the power-savings department head to head with no excuses.

VIA has now revealed its latest low-power processor line based on the Isaiah architecture, the Nano 3000 series. Targeting thin and light notebooks and all-in-one desktop PCs, the Nano 3000 single-core 64-bit CPUs go from 1 to 2GHz, have a FSB of 800 MHz, have added support for the SSE4 multimedia instruction set and VIA VT virtualization technology, and are claimed to deliver up to 20% higher performance using up to 20% less power than current VIA Nano models.

“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. “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.”

The new Nanos also boast the VIA PadLock Security Engine, are compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems, and make use of a NanoBGA2 package which means they are pin-compatible with Nano 1000, 2000 Series, C7, C7-M and Eden processors.

The Nano 3000 CPUs are currently being sampled to OEMs and board vendors and are scheduled to enter mass production in Q1 2010. Hopefully these chips will be adopted by more manufacturers so we’ll be able to see some tough battles in the low-power markets. Atom beware?

I know that I will be looking when these come around, as I was about to buy one of the last incarnations a couple of years ago, to power a SmoothWall for my house, and suddenly, they were no longer available.

There was no word of problems, no word about distributor difficulties, no word, whatsoever.

I’m looking forward to a large and full channel of new VIA offerings very soon.

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