VIA Technologies has announced today a new 3-chip silicon platform aimed at bringing HD performance to ultra portable systems. As many of you already know, another major industry player, NVIDIA, has also announced a platform for netbooks, the 9400M graphics solution.

The fresh VIA platform comes under the code name VIA Trinity, and is stated to be able to meet the performance requirements of any notebook or mini-notebook. According to the company, the platform uses a much lower board real estate than a traditional 4-chip platform, while still maintaining a lower thermal envelope.

The VIA Trinity platform combines the power of the company's VIA processor, with that of a VIA MSP and a S3 Graphics discrete GPU solution meant to provide support for DirectX 10.1, Hi-Def video and Blu-ray, while also enabling Windows Vista usage on SFF desktop, notebook and embedded markets.

VIA managed to integrate all chipset core logic, IGP, memory control, networking and peripheral connectivity, as well as multimedia functionality into a single-chip solution, courtesy of its focus on power efficiency at the silicon level. One such chip is the VIA VX800 media system processor, which offers the possibility to add a discrete graphics accelerator, while saving space and money.

“With Mini-ITX 2.0, we declared that small form factor meant no compromise on essential technologies or performance. The VIA Trinity platform is a natural extension of that philosophy for ultra compact systems,” said Richard Brown, Vice President of Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. “This platform leverages VIA's long-standing expertise in shrinking the form factor to deliver a truly high definition experience in small devices, perfect for a variety of lifestyles and applications.”

The VIA Trinity Hi-Def platform is powered by the VIA processors like the company's Nano chip. The CPU is a 64-bit, superscalar processor in VIA's portfolio, and it is able to offer both power efficiency and leverage scalability. The chip is paired with one of the VIA system media processors, digital media IGP chipsets that sport a 800MHz VIA V4 front side bus.

The platform also features support for the latest DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL graphics standards, as well as for HDMI output and playback of the latest Hi-Def content through its S3 Graphics Chrome onboard graphics accelerator that features a Chromotion HD 2.0 video engine. All video standards including H.264, MPEG-4, VC-1, WMV-HD and AVS see hardware acceleration courtesy of Chrome.