We remain unconvinced by Intel’s Atom. But it isn’t the only new chip vying for a piece of the burgeoning ultra-low cost PC (ULPC) market.

VIA has finally launched its much-anticipated Isaiah processor, which is now officially called the Nano. It’s looking very promising.

A WinChip winner at last?

Amongst all the acrimonious headlines revolving around Intel’s spat with AMD, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there is still another manufacturer making x86-compatible processors.

VIA’s CPUs haven’t been able to compete for the mainstream desktop market for some time – and indeed never really have. But they have been quietly ticking over in niche markets, particularly where low power consumption is most beneficial.

VIA purchased Centaur Technology from IDT in 1999, and with it VIA gained an x86 license. Centaur designed the WinChip, which was a Pentium-era competitor to Intel and AMD.

The WinChip was physically small, and therefore cheap to produce, but it never really won much attention. Its major failing was its floating-point performance. With entertainment software relying heavily on this – particularly video decoding and 3D games – its mainstream desktop appeal was limited.

VIA is no longer lagging behind

The WinChip evolved into the VIA C3 and C7, but it still had the same poor floating-point performance. Although the C3 started life as the Cyrix III, thanks to VIA also buying Cyrix off National Semiconductor, VIA switched to the Centaur design before launch, and has been developing this ever since.

The C7 regularly makes appearances in low-cost ultra-portables - the C7-M beats at the heart of HP's Mini-Note 2133, for example - where frugal power consumption and low cost are a boon. Just don’t go trying to play any games on one.

But the C7 doesn't handle Vista very well. This is where the Nano comes in, and why it is such a significant release for VIA. The Isaiah architecture has been promising vastly improved floating point performance ever since word got out about its development.

According to VIA’s own benchmarks of the Nano, it appears to be delivering on that promise.

VIA's Nano vs. Intel's Atom

VIA quotes floating-point performance tested using PassMark Performance Test 6.1. Pitting a 1.8GHz Nano against a 1.8GHz C7, the Nano gets 148.8 and the C7 just 73.8 – implying that the Nano is slightly more than twice as fast. The SiSoft Sandra XIIc (ALU Power Performance) result shows even more improvement – 887 versus 274, a three-fold increase.

All this bodes well. But the one thing VIA hasn’t given many details of is how the Nano measures up to Intel equivalents. The only comparison given is between a 1.6GHz Nano L2200 and a 1.6GHz Intel Celeron-M520. The Nano supposedly provides twice the performance per watt of the Celeron.

Intel’s Atom will be the main competition in the ULPC market, and that has so far proved to be rather puny. The 1.6GHz version is outperformed by a 900MHz Celeron-M in 1M SuperPI. So the Nano could be very competitive indeed with the Atom, at least in performance terms.

VIA also quotes some impressive scores for power consumption. A full range of five Nanos has been launched, from the 1GHz U2300 with a Thermal Design Power of 5W to the 1.8GHz L2100 with a TDP of 25W.  However, here Intel’s Atom may have an advantage. The Nano is quoted as consuming 100mW when idle, but the Atom supposedly needs only 30mW, and under 2.5W when fully utilised.

The ninny Nano revolution

With a current ceiling of 1.8GHz, the Nano isn’t likely to get close the performance of mainstream AMD and Intel desktop processors. It’s also currently still single-core, although VIA is planning dual-core versions in 2009.

But the Nano is VIA’s first 64-bit processor, despite the long time it is taking for the PC mainstream to move over from the current 32-bit norm.

So whilst this isn’t VIA’s answer to Intel's Core 2 Extreme and AMD's Phenom, the Nano is a much more competitive proposition than anything from VIA so far – particularly in the increasingly important low-cost portable market. It could also be the first sign of a three-horse race in processors again.