HANDS ON GUIDE

3 - VIA's Nano

A new design from the chip manufacturer with the most experience in low cost CPUs.

VIA has a long history of designing small, low TDP processors and chipsets, and until the recent products from its competitors, the only real choice of CPU for low power mini computing was VIA's C7 series. VIA has steadily grown over time, after acquiring what remained of Cyrix in the late 1990s, then S3 graphics a short time later. Tiny portable computers from the likes of OQO, and motherboards in a Mini-ITX form factor (an entire computer about the size of a packet of Marlboro Lights), have so far been unique to VIA.

However the C7 series has been criticised for offering very weak performance as you can see from this review on our sister site, PC Pro. This has prompted VIA to go for a complete redesign with their latest chip, and put a lot more emphasis on computing power, particularly in regards to floating-point calculations.

The 65nm Nano chips, which previously went under the name Isaiah, will be offered in a variety of clockspeeds from 1GHz to around 2GHz, with TDPs ranging from 5W to 25W. Unlike Intel's Atom, VIA’s chips all support the X86-64 architecture and like Atom, Nano will also scale to multiple cores in the future, which may be necessary as more applications expect more than one core present in your CPU.

The VIA Nano is being talked up by its designers as having the lowest floating point latency in add and multiply calculations of any X86 processor on the market. If true, this should certainly translate to respectable gaming performance, which would certainly be a first for VIA. Perhaps the most interesting claim from VIA is that the Nano chips have enough horsepower to run Crysis, when combined with a discrete GPU. If true, this puts them in competition with existing desktop CPUs, although until we actually get to test a chip, we're still sceptical.

Via's claims could partly be explained by the architectural improvements in the Nano. An out-of-order execution path which processors from IBM, Intel and AMD have benefited from for years will provide a big performance boost. The older in-order C7 chips would often see the CPU waiting for data to be fetched from memory, but now if data needs to be fetched, the instruction can wait in a queue and the CPU can carry on working on the next instruction. For comparison the Intel Atom still features an in-order architecture.

Although Nano looks like it could offer superior technology over Intel’s offering, success depends on more factors than mere technical superiority. Intel’s marketing and manufacturing muscle may drive prices down to crush the Nano, but time will tell. VIA was criticised for not marketing its C7 series enough and that is a mistake they cannot make this time around.

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