VIA Nano VS Intel Atom: Consolidation of Reviews

by atticus ~ August 18, 2008

Still holding out on your UMPC or Netbook purchase? How about waiting a little longer for a VIA Nano-powered mini laptop? And unlike the VIA C7 processor, the new VIA Nano (previously known as Isaiah) processor actually packs a punch as the following comparison reviews show.

VIA Nano-based OpenBook vs. Intel Atom-based Asus Eee PC - VIA Youtube Video

Scroll down to the comments section of this page to read VIA’s response to various bloggers’ queries about the video.

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

.. While the VIA Nano L2100 processor we tested had a 200MHz, or 12.5%, higher clock frequency than the 1.6GHz Atom 230, it typically outperformed the Atom by more than 15% to 20% in the applications we tested.

It’s clear from our limited testing of the VIA Nano that the company has a strong product at the ready. Virtually across the board, the Nano showed good performance versus its primary competition, and it has a number of other things going for it as well, like pin-compatibility with the established C7 core, an open platform, and hardware acceleration for certain types of encryption. Based on what we’ve seen here today, we hope many of the OEMs currently selling products based on the C7 adopt the Nano and offer products with increased performance. HP’s Mini-Note 2133 in particular comes to mind. The 2133 is one of the more attractive netbooks currently on the market and it would be enhanced significantly by the performance of the Nano processor in our opinion.

Pros:

- Strong performance in its segment
- Relatively Low Power
- OOO Execution
- Audio Encoding

Cons:

- Higher Power Consumption than Atom
- Availability

Intel Atom vs.VIA Nano - HardOCP

.. When it comes to a sheer performance comparison, the VIA Nano rules and the Intel Atom drools. The Nano is simply superior in so many ways when side-by-side with Intel Atom, but that is more from our “power geek” perspective. From our experiences here, the VIA Nano looks to be much better choice than the Intel Atom in the “mini-note” or notebook market. Conversely, the Intel Atom looks to be best equipped for what it was truly designed for and that is Mobile Internet Devices and Ultra Mobile PCs that are not Windows based. The Atom pulls much less power and is smaller in die size due to its forward-looking 45nm fabrication process and less transistors. The Nano we looked at here consumes up to 5X more power (25 watts TDP is spec) and is huge compared to Atom (63mm² vs. 25mm²). As you can see on the linked slide though, VIA has plans for Nano all the way down to 5 watt TDP power envelopes so it will be very interesting to see how Atom and Nano compare at lower speeds and wattages.

Low-end grudge match: Nano vs. Atom - ars technica

.. If we only consider processor TDP, Atom wins by a landslide. It may lose most benchmarks in absolute terms, but it always remains competitive enough to easily win any power efficiency comparison. So, VIA wins absolute performance but Intel wins power efficiency, right?

Wrong. Superman has Kryptonite, Rogue can’t touch people, and Atom, for all its super-low TDP, has been effectively hamstrung by the 945GC chipset. With a TDP of 22W, Intel’s chipset draws nearly six times more power than the processor itself, a fact that’s driven home when you realize that the tall heatsink + fan combination on the retail D945GCLF board is actually cooling the northbridge, rather than the CPU.

VIA Nano vs Intel Atom -Trusted Reviews

.. Despite VIA’s insistence that Nano really is faster than Atom, the results of our real world tests were still surprising. The sheer extent to which Nano beats Atom in nearly all our tests is quite compelling. Indeed, on this basis alone, there’s no-contest.

Intel Atom vs. VIA Nano Platform Comparo -Tweak Town

.. Bringing our attention onto VIA; they’ve done it again. Though, not surprisingly, they have had over six years to perfect the mini-ITX standard as well as having quite a long time to refine the CPU process to increase its processing power without raising the amount of power drawn. In fact, Nano doubles the performance of C7, adds 64-bit instructions yet consumes less power.

VIA Nano and Intel Atom Review - Battle of the Tiny CPUs - PC Perspective

.. Both the VIA Nano and Intel Atom processors and platforms have their own positives and drawback but it was really the VIA Nano L2100 processor that impressed me the most. Coming from a very small CPU design team here in the US, the Isaiah architecture is able to outperform Intel’s similarly priced and placed Atom processor while offering a much more open platform design. In theory this should allow OEMs and end-users to be much more creative with their Nano implementations than Atom - we’ll be eager to see what retail products form around this very potent product. As for VIA, they are basically betting it all on the Nano - it’s all or nothing from here on out.