Via, a company with a long history and many products.

I thought to start with this company, since recently, they announced a few good things. Mostly of interest is their new CPU line, the VIA Nano - Isaiah.

Some of you might remember a cpu company called "Centaur". Well, they are part of VIA. Geesh, have I been out of the news updates or what?.

Anyway, the company's that I am aware of, that have rights to the x86 architecture are/were:
AMD, IBM, INTEL, VIA, SiS and a few other companies that have either closed, are not in the PC market anymore or have been bought out by other companies.

This CPU is VIA's 1st 64bit CPU, they are similar I guess to the Intel Celeron - M, since that is also what they compare it with. I say this, according to their site, this is the one that it is being compared with. You can see their own charts and info here. It looks like it will be a great mobile Cpu for people that do NOT need multi-core solutions, and for desktop users looking for a HTPC with a very small energy footprint! It seems to be a very attractive solution for people that will NOT need to play games, or very limited gaming or older single threaded games. That is my assumption at least. It also has a lot of security features not found in the Intel/Amd camp. This would be also an ideal CPU for business's or people looking to have a very small box, no really!

If you go through their site, you will see how small their motherboards are! I would NOT have any issue AT all, to have a system, based on this CPU @ 1.8GHz and their S3 Chroma 440 GTX as my main use computer! I normally browse the web, do emails, have some other things going on like video conversion from time to time. I am NOT the kind of person that would convert a video file, and want it finished in 1 minute! I do have a life, and don't mind if something will take a while to complete, even doing seti@home or folding@home etc, i think it will be ok. Sure, it will not be the fastest and best, but then again, if I want to live away from the grid, be with solar or other alternate power supply, this will fit the bill perfectly. At the moment, I have a power hungry P4 3GHz - 530. Yes, I have my pc since November, 2004 with one of the only available PCIe cards at the time available to me, an nVidea GeForce 5750!!!

The good thing would be, the system would be much more quieter, due to less fan speed needed for a 25W CPU, or maybe a great Heatsink to be totally quiet if that is your goal.

I will post a few pages from their PR. It seems too good to pass up if this is the segment that you fall in to, that being HTPC, Low power usage or a simple no frills pc.

Ok, on now to the PR.