VIA Nano officially launched

With Intel and AMD’s back and forth fight for silicon domination, it’s easy to forget that there’s a third CPU manufacturer out there. VIA used the buzz around Computex as an opportunity to remind the world that it offers a viable alternative to the big two, with a series of major announcements that are sure to prove interesting to HTPC builders.

Earlier in the week it formally introduced its new super-efficient CPU, the VIA Nano. Based on VIA’s C7 architecture, this 64-bit chip will arrive in a 21mm x 21mm nanoBGA2 package, and has a planet-saving 100mW idle power consumption.  Utilising a 65 nanometre manufacturing process, the chip will be released in a range of frequencies from 1GHz up to 1.8GHz, all of which have an 800MHz frontside bus. Compared to heavyweight processors from AMD and Intel, the 1MB of L2 cache is relatively small, but VIA is quick to point out that the Nano is not designed for crunching through massive Photoshop files or churning through Premiere video files. Instead, judging by VIA’s marketing pitch, the Nano is targeting the home theatre market, offering plenty of power for HD video decoding.

The Nano has a new place to call home, with the simultaneous release of VIA’s VX800 Unified Digital Media IGP chipset. Combing the North and Southbridge into one 33mm x 33mm chip, the VX800 follows in the Nano’s forest-friendly footsteps, offering a total processor platform energy consumption of just 7.5W.

Within the chipset resides VIA’s Chrome9 HC3 integrated graphics core, which is capable of accelerating most of today’s commonly used video codecs, such as MPEG-2 and DivX. Whether it’s got the grunt to handle Blu-ray is another matter though, with no mention of this capability on the initial VIA press release.

Just days after these two announcements, VIA paired up with NVIDIA to release its Mini-ITX 2.0 specifications. Unlike Intel’s competing Atom specs, Mini-ITX does not limit motherboard manufacturers to a single DIMM slot and also allows them to include PCI Express slots, a big no-no for Atom boards. With this trinity of low-power, small form factor announcements, it appears that VIA’s sights are firmly set on the living room rather than the study.