Via pushing into laptop, desktop markets with 5 new chips

May 29, 2008 (Computerworld) After watching the giants of the chip market move into its territory, Via Technologies Inc. today began pushing back against the likes of Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. by introducing five new processors.

The five single-core chips that the company launched today have been newly designed from the ground up. Unlike specialized processors from rival chip makers, products in the Via Nano processor family are designed to run in everything from small devices to laptops and even desktops.

"What's happened is [that] Intel and AMD -- well, more specifically Intel -- have come into Via's world," said Dean McCarron, an analyst at Mercury Research Inc. "Via has been plugging away for the past 10 years with low-priced processors for small form factors. In the past few years, you've had this development of low-cost PCs and the emergence of the net book category. With the Atom processor, we're seeing Intel pushing in where Via has always been."

Now, Via is stretching out of its traditional arena and into its rivals' favorite niches -- like the laptop and desktop markets.

Nano's predecessor, the Via C7, was focused on the market for small-form-factor devices. Earlier this month, Intel officially unveiled its line of low-power, newly architected Atom processors for products in the same market -- mobile Internet devices that fall in between small laptops and smart phones in size and capability.

"We've been quite successful with the C7," said Richard Brown, a spokesman for Via. "To address a much broader market, we needed to improve performance. Nano allows us to move into the mainstream desktop space and bigger notebooks, like 12- or 13- or 15-inch screens."

Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at research firm Insight 64, said that he's "fairly impressed" with the Via new processors.

"It significantly improves upon performance compared with their earlier offering," said Brookwood. "For people who don't need the absolutely highest performance, the Via chip offers a good compromise in terms of performance and cost. This is not for somebody who is into heavy-duty gaming. It's not for somebody who spends all day working on Photshop or Adobe Premiere. But it sort of falls into the category of power-efficient chips. It's a little faster than Intel's Atom and comparable to some of the more affordable Celerons."

McCarron noted that the new Via chips are actually fairly old-school because they can drive a range of machines.

In past decades, chip makers actually produced processors that could be used everywhere. Then they started to specialize with families of chips for laptops and different families for desktops, for instance.

"The dirty little secret today is that most of the processor vendors still only sell one processor. They just do variations on voltage, cache size and test programs," said McCarron. "This is actually very normal for the processor market. You design one architecture and then apply it to different market segments. The main thing about this is that it is a brand-new architecture and it is the first one in some time that offers vastly greater performance. And that makes them more competitive against Intel and AMD."

Via pushing into laptop, desktop markets with 5 new chips

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