Posted on Wednesday, April 23 2008 @ 0:30 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Industry watchers
claim VIA may have a chance to recover from its long series of losses thanks to the adoption of the firm's processors in low-cost computers like the HP Mini-Note and the Gigabyte M700 UMPC. Gigabyte has already ordered 100,000 VIA C7-M ULV processors for the launch of the Mini-Note and is expected to order another 400,000 CPUs later this year.
In addition to HP and Gigabyte, more hardware vendors are said to be evaluating VIA's CPUs for their UMPC and low-cost PC products.
With limitations imposed by Intel on the features hardware vendors can offer from Atom-based platforms, (which include limited single-channel memory support and a restriction on form factors below Mini-ATX) VIA's solutions give PC makers more flexibility.
Another positive thing for VIA is that NVIDIA is going to make chipsets for VIA processors. Industry sources believe this solution could become quite popular for UMPCs, netbook and nettop products as VIA's processors use less power and NVIDIA's chipsets deliver better graphics than Intel's solution.
