Ubergadget reports;

Hewlett-Packard has recently placed orders for VIA Nano CPUs and VIA have already started shipping. It is not known whether HP will use the CPUs in it’s notebooks or netbook series. VIA has said that in addition to previous orders from Chinese companies , the company also has orders from a notebook manufacturer and the product will appear in the market by October this year. As for VIA’s C7-M processor used in HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC, the total volume that HP has ordered is a little over 500,000, which shows that HP expects to ship at least half a million 2133 Mini-Note PCs by the end of this year.

by Donald Melanson, posted Aug 11th 2008 at 12:03PM

It looks like VIA has finally had enough of the schoolyard fights with Intel and tauntings with hair dyers, as it has just dropped word over the weekend that it’s quitting the motherboard chipset business in order to focus on processors and chipsets for motherboards that use its own Nano CPU. According to Custom PC, this is actually a move that VIA had seen coming all along, with vice president of corporate marketing saying that, “one of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear.” Of course, that also means that VIA is putting most of its “chips” in one basket (yes, we said it) and, as Slashdot points out, it leaves other third-party chip manufacturers like SiS with some tough questions to ask themselves.

Do you cheer for the underdog? Would you love to see VIA unseat Intel in the battle for the hearts and minds of netbook market share just because Intel’s, well, Intel? Good, then you’ll love this highly emotive video produced by VIA showing its meager 1.3GHz Nano processor kicking Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom to the curb in a 1080p HD video test. We’d be more suspect of the results had we not already seen VIA clean Intel’s house in the head-to-head benchmarks. Now pull up a seat ringside and get ready to sputter along with the Atom-based netbook

 

Nano vs Atom Video

Netbooks based on VIA’s Nano mobile processor aren’t nearly as common as those based on Intel’s Atom, but based on the benchmarking that’s been going on recently, that’s a shame, since the Nano appears to be much faster than the Atom 230. PC Perspective, Eee PC News, and Hot Hardware all ran some tests recently, and a 1.8GHz Nano L2100 with Chrome9 graphics was usually able to outperform a 1.6GHz Atom 230 with GMA950 graphics at everything from MP3 ripping to 3D benchmarking. Of course, that’s not without a tradeoff — the Nano was a bit more power-hungry, and the Atom’s memory and graphics systems were occasionally faster than the Nano’s. Still, it seems like the Nano has more raw horsepower than the Atom — and it’s pin-compatible with VIA’s popular C7M, so hopefully we’ll be seeing machines like HP’s Mini-Note make the jump relatively soon.

Via has released the details of its successor to the Nanobook, called the Openbook.

It’s a reference design that will be re-badged and tweaked by manufacturers just like the Nanobook was (Belinea’s S.book 1 and Packard Bell’s Easynote XS used Via’s older design).

Powered by the VIA C7-M ULV processor and the VIA VX800 digital media IGP chipset, the VIA OpenBook mini-note reference design is a small, 1kg, 8.9″ mini-notebook form factor design that supports screen resolutions of up to 1024×600 and high performance VIA Chrome9â„¢

DirectXâ„¢ 9.0 3D graphics. Advanced video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC1 and DiVX video formats, a VMR capable HD video processor and 8-channel HD audio make it a highly media rich mini-notebook platform.

 

http://www.viaopenbook.com

 

Today VIA announced the VIA Nano processor family based on the VIA Isaiah Architecture.

Building on the market-leading energy efficiency of the VIA C7 processor family, the VIA Nano processor family offers as much as four times the performance within the same power range to extend VIA’s performance per watt leadership, while pin compatibility with VIA C7 processors will ensure a smooth transition for OEMs and motherboard vendors, and provides them with an easy upgrade path for current system or board designs.

The chip is going to be offered with a 800Mhz front side bus and clock speeds from 1.0GHz to 1.8GHz. The release also states the Maximum Power requirements (TDP Max) from 5W to 25W depending on the clock speed. The release also contains some of the additional features including 64-bit Out-of-Order MicroArchitecture, VIA Padlock Security Engine, and PowerSaver Technology. Click the link above for the full release.

Engadget is reporting on new rules for the UMPC XP market, From the article;

While Microsoft has seen it fit to keep XP around as its “relatively non-bloated OS” alternative to the Linux that has dominated this new category of “ultra low-cost PCs” (ULPCs), they’re certainly not giving away the farm. Microsoft doesn’t want this version of XP Home creeping into mainstream laptops and desktops, where it might compete with Vista sales and high-margin machines from PC manufacturers. To that end, Microsoft is setting the limits for ULPCs at 10.2-inch screens, 80GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, 1GHz processors (with some exceptions) and no touchscreens. The upshot is that licenses for XP will go for $26 in developing nations and $32 elsewhere. Too bad the XP faithful among us will need to try a bit harder to wrangle XP onto new machines of theirs that don’t fit these narrow specifications.

What does this mean for the Mininote if it gets the new VIA Isaiah CPU?