VIA's Nano family of chips put to the test

Earlier today, VIA Technologies made public details on its new Nano processing chip family that comprises five processors. VIA claims improved performance compared to its own C7 processors, and has provided test results it says prove the fact. The competition is also squarely in sights, as the Nanos' x86 instruction set allows it to run the same software as Intel's Atom and AMD Celeron M CPUs, with which the Nano was designed to compete. Performance comparisons are already surfacing from independent sources.

When benchmarked against similar competitors running at 1.6GHz, like Intel's Atom CPU, AMD's Celeron M and VIA's own C7-M, the floating-point math coprocessor rated second only to the Celeron, and just edged out the Intel chip. Compared to the C7, the Nano's FPU performed nearly 79 percent better. In arithmetic logic unit (ALU) testing, the new VIA chip outperformed all by at least 25 percent, with the C7 beat by some 164 percent. The result somewhat mirrored VIA's own FPU and ALU tests, where the new chip was 87 and 223 percent better than the C7, respectively.

More in-house testing comparing the new chip to the C7 revealed performance that was better across the board to the tune of 140 percent overall in productivity applications testing. This included Office document processing programs and Internet Explorer 7. The PC WorldBench 6 multimedia test saw the Nano outperform the C7 by 47, 46 and 36 percent when performing tasks in Windows Media Encoder, Adobe PhotoShop and Roxio VideoWave software, respectively. The Nano CPUs have been designed to draw little power, and the company believes the new chips are nearly twice as capable compared to the power they use, as seen in the Performance per Watt Comparison graph.

Despite the significant improvements, VIA's C7 chips will still be used in certain products for the foreseeable future, including VIA's recently launched OpenBook UMPC.

Benchmark testing