Yesterday I talked about VIA. Today, they are back in the news by announcing an updated Nano processor which, sadly, is not the anticipated dual core version of the chip.
The new chip is part of the new 3000 series Nano processor and VIA is touting some impressive idle power numbers, with clockspeeds remaining about the same:
100mW of idle power is a very good thing, the problem is VIA doesn't quite seem to want to release load power figures. Since the 2000 series are quite power hungry, especially the 1.8GHz L model at 25W, and the PR guys want to keep those figures under wraps, it's probably safe to think that load power wasn't improved. The U2000 models are quite decent though, at 5-8W TDP, performance is still better than the Atom and you get the x86-64 support that I love so much.
Performance has increased on some applications, although VIA doesn't mention how - probably some architectural improvements:
The new stepping of the "Isaiah" also supports SSE4 and has support for hardware virtualization, already present in some steppings of the Nano 2000.
The Nano is now an even better alternative to the Atom then before and graphics capabilities of the VX800 or VX855 are around double those of Intel's GMA 950 - which is still nothing spectacular.
If you're on the market for netbooks or ultraportables, you might want to take a look at these new processors.
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