VIA's Trinity Platform brings much-needed religious imagery to small form factor media acceleration

Not to be outdone by NVIDIA's move to accelerate netbook graphics with its new Ion platform, VIA just debuted its "Trinity" platform, which pairs a VIA Nano chip with a Media System Processor like the VIA VX800 and a discrete S3 Graphics PCI Express GPU. VIA is aiming this lineup at netbooks and mini-PCs, and are planning to power DirectX 10.1, HD video, Blu-ray playback and Windows Vista. Sounds fine and dandy to us, but unfortunately, like with NVIDIA, we're at the mercy of the manufacturers who will actually be stuffing this into their product -- and they've sure seemed gun-shy with Nano so far. Hopefully this can change some of that, Christian Bale is only half as badass at 15 fps QVGA.

[Dee Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:19AM]

When are their opensource notebooks coming out? It would be sweet if it cam paired with this.

[tommychan123hotmailcom Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:23AM]

S3 graphics is the first and foremost reason that you should avoid this platform.

[dez Posted Dec 18th 2008 12:08PM]

@tom

I'm more than sure you have no idea what you're talking about. Trying to tell me that integrated Intel graphics are worth jack shit is just plain upsetting to begin with. Via has already proven itself more than competent at kicking the shit out of Atom processors that are spec'd far higher. I trust Via to really bend over Intel for these small form factor applications, and it's about damn time someone called out Intel for their pathetic attempts at integrated graphics.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:20AM]

This is interesting, 2. option to the Atom processors from intel..
i like i am not totaly understanding the tec but well anything for some more power in the netbook area

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:21AM]

Looks like 3 neckties attacking.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:33AM]

you sir are getting highly ranked! well said!

[ebob9 Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:29AM]

Is it an S3 ViRGE chipset?

[cb88 Posted Dec 18th 2008 12:29PM]

considering they just said dx 10.1 ... that would mean the chrome 400 and 500 series (or a cut down low power verison... would still lay waste to intel) which are pretty fast and are supposed to have Linux drivers coming out (makes sense lots of netbooks run Linux)

im guessing it will be an underclocked chrome 430-530 or a newer smaller/effiecient design of those chips. The GPU wouldn't have to handle hd decoding with the media processor so that goes along with an underclocked GPU since the full versions can decode HD but us more power

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:38AM]

Useless bit of trivia for you all; I used to live on a street in sicily called VIA Nano. I just wanted you to get to know me a little bit better.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 18th 2008 2:21PM]

So Christian Bale in Equilibrium or Reign of Fire?

[Dan Fruzzetti Posted Dec 18th 2008 9:28PM]

How come he doesn't decrease linearly with size? I mean I would expect him to be only one-quarter as good or even one-eighth at that small resolution and that low frame rate.... Then we should also consider synergy; do the two different performance hits work together to make the experience especially bad?

If not, then that Bale guy would do himself a favor by doing some asymptotic shrinking toward zero...