Filed under: Laptops

Here in the US of A, most netbooks come stocked with a predictable array of hardware: a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 80GB HDD, 1GB of RAM and a price tag ranging from $399 to $699. Elsewhere on the planet, things are a bit different, and if VIA has anything to say about it, it will be the name people think of when hearing “netbook” in Asia and beyond. Said outfit has just cranked up a Global Mobility Bazaar program to “drive [global] mobile computing adoption,” and it has already managed to pull 15 companies (including Microsoft, for a little thing called WinXP) onboard. In essence, the program will enable second-tier vendors to get in the netbook game and offer products with shorter life cycles and lower prices — both of which are mighty useful in emerging markets. In somewhat related news, we’re also hearing a sketchy report that HP has chosen the Intel route for its future netbooks, and considering that the Vivienne Tam Digital Clutch has already selected Intel, we suppose the forthcoming Mini 1000 will likely be the real confirmation / denial.

[Via Liliputing]

Read - VIA’s Global Mobility Bazaar
Read - HP choosing Intel?

VIA teams with Microsoft to drive low-cost netbooks in global markets originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Desktops

We know the past couple years haven’t been kind to VIA-owned S3 Graphics — market share has declined, and NVIDIA and ATI keep introducing fancy new technologies, making it tough to keep up. That said, we’re inspired by S3’s ardent attempts to stay relevant in an industry that won’t easily make room for small competitors. The latest case in point: the company has released a photo-editing app to demonstrate the newly-programmed GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) functionalities of its DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400 line of discrete graphics cards. S3 claims its hard work has produced an HPC environment that can be used to reduce processing time for scientific and other applications from days to seconds — we’ll believe it when we see it, but you’ve gotta admire the tenacity.

[Via CustomPC]

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Filed under: Desktops

Okay, so maybe those all-in-one PCs have their positives, but seriously, who really looks forward to paying good money for something that’s so impossible to upgrade? Tim Schellekens sure doesn’t, and rather than biting the bullet, he chose to snap up one of VIA’s EPIA motherboards, an old school 15-inch LCD and a bit of fiberglass. The four pages waiting for you in the read link detail the transformation, and while we personally wouldn’t have gone to such extremes (buying two monitors to get one?) just to craft our own web surfing desktop, we definitely admire the dedication. Behold, i-EPIA.

[Thanks, Ewan]

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Filed under: Robots

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

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.

[Via Slashdot]

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Filed under: Laptops

Continue reading VIA Nano trounces Intel Atom in HD video playback? Not quite.

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Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops

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 — video after the break.

[Via UMPC Portal]

Continue reading VIA Nano whoops Intel’s Atom (again) on video

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Filed under: Laptops

Not particularly thrilled with the performance of your HP Mini-Note 2133? If you’re vigorously shaking your head up and down as that render chugs along in the background, take a listen at this. The folks over at HP 2133 Guide took the time to benchmark their Vista / XP systems and then apply VIA’s recently released drivers for the CN896 chipset and Chrome9 integrated graphics. Not surprisingly, they found the update totally worthwhile. Based on pure numerical changes, there’s not a lot to phone home about, but critics did note that “video playback was improved quite a bit on each OS,” and that YouTube / Hulu vids were actually watchable post-update. Not a lot of downside to upgrading, so head on over and see what the new drivers have in store for you.

[Via jkOnTheRun]

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Filed under: Laptops

It only makes sense that VIA’s contribution to the quickly growing netbook world — the OpenBook — get ripped wide open, wouldn’t you agree? Better still, this isn’t your typical dissection, as the invasive Tim Brown tears apart his own product on video. Three minutes of teardown is just one click away.

Continue reading VIA’s OpenBook gets fittingly ripped open

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Filed under: Peripherals

Remember middle school? These guys do. NVIDIA, AMD, VIA and now SiS (only two capital letters? Not trying hard enough) have all teamed up in a fight against Intel of truly pubescent proportions. Intel has denied accusations of hiding the USB 3.0 spec, since it’s not their spec to hide, and claims it has no obligation to disclose its actual host controller specification before it’s ready. This apparently has the other chip makers scrambling to make their own host controller, so they aren’t beholden to Intel’s schedule. That could cause problems for the end product — if they don’t build theirs exactly like Intel’s, and with Intel’s already being on the market by the time they’re done, they’ll have to return to the drawing board and possibly delay their release by nine months. They claim this could give Intel two years of zero competition in the USB 3.0 space, but Intel figures since it plans to release the spec for free, is investing heavily in its development, and isn’t done yet anyways, it doesn’t owe those companies a thing. This just gets better and better.

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Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops

Sweet, and likely salty. That’s VIA’s “special assistant to the president,” Timothy Chen, giving NVIDIA’s Drew Henry, general manager of its MCP business, a little sugar. The moment was captured after the unveiling of the Mini-ITX 2.0 spec at Computex last week. Why? We’re not exactly sure, but we imagine things can get a bit emotional when old enemies join forces against a foe as formidable as Intel. Now give eachother a firm slap on the back, punch to the shoulder, and possibly, if it feels right… a noogie. There’s much to do if NVIDIA’s Tegra and VIA’s Nano are to supplant Intel’s Silverthorne and Diamondville in future MIDs and netbooks, respectively.

[Thanks, Richard L.]

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Filed under: Laptops

Man, we’ve waited so long for Intel’s Silverthorne to become Atom to become product that we’re feeling a bit misty at the sight of all those Atom-based netbooks pictured above. Intensified by the fact that VIA has apparently come to the show without a single Nano-based netbook of its own. Hold tight while we await official word from Dell about their “mini-Inspiron” netbook expected sometime today.

Read — Atom
Read — VIA Nano

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Filed under: Laptops

As if things weren’t confusing enough in the world of tiny computers, Qualcomm went and blurted off news about a $299 machine that will run Windows Mobile 7 on its Snapdragon mobile chip set. Qualcomm’s senior veep Luis Pineda boasted that the machine will run WinMo7 and is more efficient than its competitors from the likes of Intel, AMD, and Via. When pressed, he wouldn’t give up any additional hardware specs, but he promises a “big presence in Snapdragon-based devices at CES 2009″. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen mention of Windows Mobile 7, but it’s quite possibly the first tie-in with a specific product group. We look forward to the Snapdragon-Intel-AMD-Via mobile computing war in the coming year, indeed.

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Filed under: Laptops

Although late in arriving, Sony appears ready to join the low-cost, ultra-portable, netbook, mini-laptop party. An apparently generic prototype based on the Via OpenBook was just spotted at the Quanta booth at WiMax Expo. It seems that a quick check of the properties revealed a 1.6GHz Via C7-M processor and more interestingly, Sony as the manufacturer. When the Quanta exec demonstrating the box noticed “he quickly closed the properties window and declined to explain.” Sony refused to comment. In other words, expect to see it in Q3.

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Filed under: Desktops, Handhelds, Laptops

Today is a day that PC Perspective is calling “one of the most pivotal days in the history of VIA Technologies.” That isn’t just hyperbole either, son. Via’s Isaiah processor is now official and re-dubbed Nano. The Atom-spanking (at least preliminarily), 65-nm processors come in U (ultra-portable) and L (desktop and laptop) classes with a maximum power rating between 5W to 25W. The 1GHz U2300, 1.3+GHz U2400, and 1.2GHz U2500 pull just 5W, 8W, and 6.8W, respectively with an itty bitty 100mW idle draw. Products are expected to hit shelves (and your palm) sometime in Q3. We’ll bring you the detailed Nano vs. Atom vs. Puma benchmarks just as soon as we get ‘em.

[Thanks, Ryan]

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Filed under: Laptops

We got to spend a little bit of time with a prototype of VIA’s new OpenBook reference design, and while it’s not going to revolutionize anything, VIA does seem to have a pretty good grasp on the balance of value, size and power necessary to compete in the subnotebook game. They were showing it off with Vista (though it will be available in XP and Linux versions as well), with an interface that was plenty responsive, and while the video we saw wasn’t an incredible display of multimedia showmanship, it was neat to see on the C7-M all the same. Our two main gripes are the seeming thickness of the device — 1.4-inches might be par for the course, but with this small of a laptop it seems awkwardly thick — and the itty-bitty, cheap-looking keyboard that doesn’t utilize the whole width of the laptop. The hope with a reference design is that some manufacturer might even be able to improve on VIA’s version, and we’d say the first problem point to address is the keyboard. That said, we’re quite impressed that VIA’s crammed as much inside the OpenBook as it has, and perks like 3G / 4G connectivity, a trio of USB ports and a media card reader are making that MacBook Air look positively last century. Now the waiting game for one of the dozens of OEM types to start pumping these out of factories and into the arms of cherub-faced mini-note fans the world over. Video is after the break.

Continue reading VIA OpenBook hands-on

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Filed under: Desktops

Nothing seems to be official just yet, but it looks like VIA is set to both adopt an always-desirable 45nm manufacturing process for its processors and roll out its first dual-core processors by the end of 2009, at least if the “sources at the company” DigiTimes has heard from are to be believed. Unfortunately, there’s apparently no further details on either of those tantalizing possibilities just yet, but the company has done a bit of bragging about its current CPU shipments, saying that it expects its shipments in the first half of 2008 to equal its total shipments in 2007 — a number that only seems set to go up if Isiah’s benchmarks are any indication.

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Filed under: Laptops

You knew this day would come: Intel positioned Atom perfectly to compete with VIA’s low-power offerings, and VIA is trying to stay one step ahead in the low power game with its Isaiah processor. Who will be the winner? Well, we’d say it’s still a little early to call it, but German site Eee PC News did some quick and dirty benchmarks that show Isaiah on top by a decent margin. At this point the numbers are just in “ALU” and “FPU,” but hopefully some real world benchmarks from some retail products can clear this up before long.

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Following up yesterday’s trash talk with a little action, NVIDIA has disclosed plans to create a sub-$45 processing platform which the GPU-maker is calling, “The World’s Most Affordable Vista Premium PC.” The architecture will combine VIA’s Isaiah processor with an integrated NVIDIA graphics chipset, which the company claims outperforms Intel’s Celeron-based, 945 IGP/ICH4 setup handily. Apparently, the combo is capable of 36 GFLOPS versus Intel’s 6.4GFLOPS — which we shouldn’t have to tell you is a ton of GFLOPS. We’re excited about the prospect of better performance in an integrated chipset (we’ve all suffered at the hands of the GMA950), but we don’t want to see this end in a back-alley knife fight. Keep your cool, guys.

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Filed under: Laptops, Wireless

Not too long ago, we gave you loyal Cloudbook owners a chance to voice your opinion on how you’d change things. Fast forward a few weeks, and take a gander at what Everex has put together. Debuting today at CTIA 2008, the Cloudbook MAX not only boasts an 8.9-inch WVGA (1,024 x 600) display, Windows Vista, 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth, integrated GPS receiver, 2-megapixel webcam and a battery good for four hours, but it also features an 80GB HDD, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, audio in / out and an S-Video output. Beyond all that, this thing gets energized by a 1.6GHz VIA C7-M ULV processor coupled with the VX800 digital media IGP chipset, which touts full DirectX 9 support and video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC1 and DivX video formats (plus a VMR-capable HD video processor, among other things). Lastly, the unit includes built-in support for Sprint’s XOHM WiMAX network. Brimming with excitement yet? Start stocking that piggy bank — this currently unpriced rig will be available in the latter half of this year across North America.

Read - VIA and Everex demonstrate Cloudbook MAX at CTIA
Read - VIA VX800 Series Chipset

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