Via Nano CPU availability -- any guesses?

[dougz]

I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the Nano CPU compared to the Atom in some of the early reviews cited in http://via.com.tw/en/index.jsp

Of course, the reviews are based on engineering samples and employed old C7 boards. Also, the reviews are preliminary and not as detailed as one might like. Still, looks like a competitve product.

Does anyone have any idea when production lots will be available? Via does have an unfortunate history of overpromising/underdelivering, late ships, etc., so I'm not inclined to be particularly hopeful. OTOH, the small notebook market should be a powerful enticement and Atoms are still in short supply.

One other bright spot -- better Linux support:

While talking to various employees I came across a group that was trying to solve a booting issue with the VIA Nano processor and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Without getting too technical all processors have fuses that can be blown to enable and disable various areas of the processor. Centaur discovered that by blowing one specific fuse that they created a booting issue with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I listened in for a bit and in a matter of minutes they were able to find the cause of a problem and fix it while I was standing there!
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/719/2/

Great pictures in the Legit Reviews article...

[dougz]

VIA quits motherboard chipset business

VIA is now focusing on x86 processors and the integrated motherboard market, rather than chipsets for third-party CPUs...

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/604608/v ... iness.html

More -- http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl ... 1&from=rss

[dougz]

Product VIA Nano
Verdict On paper and in testing, VIA's Nano beats Intel's Atom hands down. But the pricing may kill it as a competitor.
Suggested Price TBC

Preview The mobo in our pics may look like a VIA SN18000G, which sells for about £150 with a 1.8GHz C7 processor, but it’s more exciting: it's a reference board for VIA's would be Atom-smasher: Nano.

It's designed to demonstrate the new 1.8GHz VIA Nano L2100, to be precise. The CPU's fabbed at 65nm and is set to consume no more than 25W of power. It supports the Intel's SSE 3 instruction set. It runs on an 800MHz frontside bus, and in many respects it's the least interesting model in the Nano range....

Verdict

From our initial survey, it's clear VIA's Nano is a promising processor. But we were unimpressed by the performance of the CN896 chipset and Chrome9 graphics, and the prospect of a £150 price fills us with horror. VIA, say it ain’t so!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/14 ... _via_nano/