Bags of Netbook Chips Arriving from Intel, VIA

I have potato chips on the brain, so please excuse the headline. (I like Herr’s Kettle Cooked if you need birthday ideas, BTW). We’ve got new netbook chips on the way today, or at least there are announcements of ‘em.

Intel is officially shipping their next Atom CPU, the N280-series as of today. Of course, we already knew about that. I guess nobody at ASUS told Intel that pre-orders started for the Asus Eee PC 1000HE earlier in the week. That’s the newest Eee PC (for the next few hours, anyway) which uses said Intel Atom N280. NVIDIA’s ION and AMD’s Yukon competing platforms can drive 1080p video, but I’m not sold that a $400 netbook needs that kind of graphical prowess. Intel must not be sold on that either because the new Atom chipset hardware decodes 720p content. That’s actually something I can’t wait to test since my N270-powered Wind chokes on that sort of stuff.

VIA is just about ready to play in this game as well. DigiTimes says that VIA will ship between 150,000 and 200,000 U225 Nano chipsets this quarter. All of those are slated for the 12-inch Samsung NC20. Last I heard, this processor clocks in at 1.3GHz and provides a blazing 1333MHz front-side bus. That’s double the FSB of the new Atom N280, which comes in at 667MHz. I don’t see the U225 listed on VIA’s Nano product page, so we’ll check in for more info. Suffice it to say for now: everything we’ve heard about the Nano so far indicates that it will offer more performance-per-watt than the Atom. It will likely use more power overall as well, so I expect a trade-off to be involved in that regard.

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