VIA Nano L2100 vs. Intel Atom 230: Head to Head

Hot Hardware got their hands on a VIA Nano reference motherboard with a 1.8GHz VIA Nano L2100 processor and checks out how well VIA's new Nano processors compete against Intel's Atom:

VIA caused quite a stir a few months ago when the company first revealed initial details regarding their low-power Nano processor. At the time, the product was referred to by its internal codename of Isaiah and the president of the design center that was tasked with making the processor was decidedly outspoken, which made for some exciting reporting. When news of the Isaiah core first broke, we hopped on the line with Glenn Henry, VIA's Centaur design center president, and got many questions answered regarding the processor's architecture, features, expected performance, and the company's plans for the CPU. We also covered the official announcement of the VIA Nano processor and detailed the exact models that would be available at launch. One thing we hadn't been able to do, however, was a direct performance comparison of the VIA Nano processor versus Intel's recently released Atom, which is target at the same market segment. Thankfully, we were recently given the opportunity to take a VIA Nano reference platform for a spin to see what it could do and will be presenting our results for you here today.

Check it out over here. The reviewer concludes that in general the VIA Nano outperforms a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 processor by 15-20%. However, the downside is the higher power consumption - in idle the 65nm Nano uses 2W more than the 45nm Atom and in load it uses 19W more.