VIA plans to launch a dual core Nano chip

Intel has the lion’s share of the netbook market to itself right now, with its Atom chips powering almost every low cost 10 inch notebook available in the US and Europe. But AMD is taking aim at the space, with its current Nile chips and upcoming Ontario chips. And chip-maker VIA also has a new play up its sleeve.

VIA had a few successes in the early days of the netbook. The HP Mini 2133 launched in 2008 with a VIA chip, and the Everex Cloudbook which turned out to be more exciting before it launched was also powered by VIA technology. In the last year though, VIA has had far more success in China and developing nations.

Still, the company’s upcoming dual core chip sounds interesting. VIA is still pushing it as a low power chip, but with a TDP of 20W, the company’s upcoming processor will likely end up in larger notebooks rahter than netbooks. The chip will have a 2GHz clock speed and a 133MHz BUS as well as 2MB of L2 cache.

VIA also plans to launch a quad-core CPU by the end of 2011, with support for DirectX 11. Something tells me that chip will use even more power.

I could certainly see a 2GHz dual core Nano chipset finding its way into thin and light notebooks. Lenovo tried out a Nano chip in an early version of the Ideapad S12 notebook before phasing out that product line.[/img]