Sounds good on paper-- I'd like to see VIA deliver a GPU that can actually run 3D apps.

The Chrome9 HC chipset, currently VIA's top-end integrated GPU solution, is absolutely miserable. It's so bad that moving to GMA950 is a HUGE sigh of relief.

Sure, 3D apps might not be the most important thing around for netbooks and small media PCs, but Chrome9 HC literally cannot handle anything more advanced than the original Unreal Tournament at 800x600. Halo PC in DX7 mode at 640x480 would run at an awesome 5-10 FPS (2-5 FPS and all sorts of graphical corruption in DX9 mode), compared to 25 FPS in DX9 mode on GMA950.

That said, Via's CPUs are interesting. C7 was in many cases (and in almost all benchmarks) slower than Atom, but it actually seems to handle multitasking a bit better. I have an HP 2133 with a C7 1.6 and Chrome 9 HC, and compared to my Acer Aspire One with Atom 1.6/GMA950, it's actually able to handle much higher app loads (dozens of tabs open in Chrome + Opera, Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc.) without locking up. But in many cases, it's slower than Atom, which makes life quite annoying, and runs much hotter (and uses more power-- 2133 with 6-cell lasts 3.5 hrs). Nano fixes the performance issues in most cases-- not sure on real-world heat output.

Nano + ION should be an interesting combo, if it ever arrives.

Another one of these would be cool.

This would be awesome.

Yep!

Yep

Me

Me!

Let's give it a shot...

Heh, I'll give it a shot.

Not at all-- the iPhone 3GS has an ARM Cortex A8 CPU, which is twice as fast clock-for-clock than ARM11 CPUs like the Qualcomm MSM7200 (used by HTC) and the Samsung chip in the iPhone 3G. The 3GS is roughly 2.2x faster than the MSM7200 in general CPU performance, around 50x faster in floating-point operations (MSM7200 lacks hardware VFP and so relies on a WM DLL to handle FPU ops), with a graphics chip that's >10x faster.

Since the iPhone/iPhone 3G has a hardware VFP, it's around 20-25x faster clock-for-clock at floating-point ops (which iPhone OS uses pretty heavily but WinMo doesn't at all, as it's optimized for the ancient ARMv5 instruction set-- some native WM apps can make use of it if present, though).