14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia's strategic alliance with VIA on the ultra-mobile PC market has been confirmed during yesterday's financial meeting held by the graphics specialist. The two companies will march together on the extremely appealing ultra-low-cost notebook market in order to fight Intel's upcoming Atom processor.
VIA is still one of the all-time favorite low-power processor manufacturers, as its Nanobook low-cost design has been widely adopted by a few industry leaders, such as ECS, Everex, HP, and Dell. On the other side of the fence, Intel's processor found a cozy home in Asustek's both desktop and mobile low-cost products, including the Eee PC notebook and the Digital Home System EP20 or Essentio CS5110 desktops.
Nvidia has put up quite a fight with Intel, and even claimed that the manufacturer's integrated graphics cores are nothing but "a joke" as compared to its own offerings. Although the company did not plainly state this, it let analysts believe that it can be much better than Intel on the low-cost notebook market.
However, in order to perform on the UMPC stage, Nvidia desperately needs what it currently does not have: a processor unit to manufacture energy-efficient x86 chips. A system built on VIA's expertise in the low-energy CPU field, paired with a powerful chipset with integrated graphics would simply bring huge benefits on a continually increasing niche market.
Nvidia ever unveiled plans for a new architecture, touted as being "The World's Most Affordable Vista Premium PC". The platform is built around VIA's Isaiah chip and Nvidia's integrated graphics chipset. According to Nvidia, the VIA Isaiah and the Nvidia IGP team could score a total power of 36 GFLOPS, as compared to 6.4 GFLOPS (the total power of a Celeron-M chip paired with Intel's 945 IGP/ICH4 chipset).
More than that, the new platform is touted to support DirectX 10 and Blu-Ray/HD technologies at an estimative price of about $45.