VIA VN1000 And Nano DC

Before the two CPU and GPU giants took over the computer hardware market, alongside Pentiums and K6s VIA, Cyrix and few other types of processors were sold in stores worldwide. Unfortunately that’s when the fierce battle began and the great majority of manufacturers simply couldn’t keep up, only AMD and Intel remained in the race, while others disappeared or continued to make embedded products in which the two big manufacturers had no interest.

VIA somehow managed to keep development going over the years, and strikes a blow in the low-power sector to Intel and AMD processors which didn’t evolve fast enough. Today we’re looking at the VIA Nano DC processor and at VN1000 northbridge, and of course at all the other necessary chips on the motherboard that has also been made by VIA. The VT8261 chip is responsible for 4 SATA2 ports and 12 USB ports. VT1211 multi I/O controller handles legacy devices such as the floppy drive, IDE … and so on.

This is an actual, working prototype of the motherboard, but VIA is expected to significantly reduce the size once it reaches manufacturing. Recent VIA motherboards measured only 10cm x 7.2cm, the pico-ITX standard, but even smaller mainboards were made with everything on-board (CPU, GPU and system memory).

I don’t exclude the idea of a single-chip design, because VIA could simply combine its chips into one huge super-chip with everything inside. Too bad that such small firms don’t have the necessary funds to go on such an adventure. Combining two or more components (chips) always increases the number of faulty, unusable chips at manufacturing. Even Intel decided to make separate 45nm chips for the memory controller and integrated GPU, instead of melting everything together. It was completely understandable, because Core i3, i5 and i7 processors have so many transistors already, that there isn’t any space left for other functions.

The Intel Atom processor was another story. It had a very small dye size right from the start and its architecture is also extremely simple (compared to a mainstream processor) with only a fraction of transistors found in the case of the Core i3. Intel managed to integrate both GPU and a memory controller into the Atom CPU.

Believe it or not, the VIA mainboard needs only a couple of memory modules and a hard disk to start up. It’s fully x86 compatible, so comparing it to other Intel processors was a piece of cake, Tomshardware volunteered to do it.

To really see what the VIA GPU is capable of delivering, I’m not going to show other benchmark results, but just the one made with Crysis, the toughest 3D-intensive game ever made. Most graphics card testers use this game, because it focuses on the GPU and very little on other hardware components.

As you can see the VIA system holds its ground against the Core i3, which has a built-in last generation Intel GMA HD graphics chip, which competes with some of AMD’s on-board solutions.

When it comes to efficiency, the VIA system is acceptable, even better than the Atom configurations in what concerns many of its benchmarks. The GPU efficiency seems fine, and the CPU will be improved before being manufactured, it will be redesigned for 45nm manufacturing process. It will be shipped sometime in 2011.

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