While 2008 and 2009 were mostly about netbooks, 2010 could just be about the growing segment for thin and light laptops, as both Intel and AMD have announced products to support said segment. On that note, it appears that another chip maker – VIA Technologies, to be more specific –, has also decided to join in the race, with the official announcement for its new series of Nano processors, namely the Nano 3000 family of chips. According to the company, these chips are built on the 'Isaiah' architecture and are specifically targeted at thin and light notebooks, consequently competing with Intel's CULV and AMD's Neo processors.

“With the VIA Nano 3000 Series, we are launching our fastest and most power-efficient processors yet,” commented Richard Brown, VP International Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. “Coupled with our market-leading digital media chipsets, they enable the richest experience across a broad range of mobile and all-in-one system designs.”

Built on the same 64-bit, superscalar architecture that is also behind VIA's Nano 1000 and 2000 Series of processors, the new CPUs use a NanoBGA2 package, making them pin-to-pin compatible with the previous generation of Nano processors mentioned above. The series is said to deliver up to 20% higher performance, while using 20% less power, and featuring support for SSE4 multimedia instruction set and VIA VT virtualization technology. There are six new models available, with clock speed ranging from 1GHz to 2GHz, while idle power ranges from 100mW to 500mW.

Expected to become available in new Windows 7-powered thin and light portable computer systems, the processors are already available to OEMs and motherboard vendors, with mass production scheduled for the first quarter of 2010. It will be interesting to see how these new VIA Nano processors will compare to the upcoming line of Intel CULV or AMD Neo CPUs, also designed for the same segment that VIA's new CPUs are targeting, namely thin and light portable PCs.