The Via Amos 3000: A monitor-mountable Pico ITX board running at 500Mhz, with 1GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet, four USB, and DVI video, in a cool metal case with no fan. It can probably grill burgers too. [BBG]
The hippies philanthropists at OLPC are overhauling the guts of their XO-1 with the aim of keeping the portable’s battery life while increasing its capabilities.
Samsung has (finally) become the first major netbook manufacturer to adopt VIA’s hot, hot Nano platform, announcing today the 12″, fat-batteried NC20.
You may be wondering why every netbook we write about seems to have the same Intel Atom processor. Some of it has to do with Intel’s prominence in the entire processor market at the moment (which makes competition from Via little contest), and some of it has to do with AMD not stepping up to duke it out in the tiny laptop arena. AMD simply has no interest in the mini-laptop market, and CEO Dirk Meyer makes it abundantly clear:
Via’s Nano and Intel’s Atom low-power processors are intended for slightly different purposes, but that didn’t stop HardOCP pitting them against each other in performance tests, and coming up with some interesting results. In every single benchmark, the beefier Nano beat the Atom. In particular it was 59% better in MP3 encoding tests, 37% in Divx encoding and achieved double the frame rate in Quake 4. No surprises there: the Nano is designed to draw a little more current (53W against 45W) than the Atom, so it won’t make it into quite the same hand-held gizmos as Intel’s chip. But the tests revealed that under normal “desktop” usage, the Nano actually drew less power when idling. Looks like Via’s got a hot one in its grip: we might expect to see more of this chip. [HardOCP via BBG]
Nvidia has been pretty tight with Via, the scrappy maker of low-power chips for tiny laptops and mobile internet devices, to the point of sparking rumours Nvidia wanted to buy ‘em. But Taiwanese rag Digitimes says their buddy-buddy relationship is just leverage for Nvidia to muscle its way into Intel’s Atom platform.
The mini-notebook market is heating up, with today bringing stats and shots of the Asus’s latest Eee PC with it’s tiny screen and keys that might work with normal hands. Then later, we get news of a leak about Everex, Asus’s competitor in this market, about its next Cloudbooks, including one with a 10.2-inch screen and 3G connectivity, and another with an 8.9-inch screen and WiMAX.
No definite word on if they’ll be using Intel’s Atom processors or competitors from Via, or if they’ll be XP or Linux machines, but the makers of the reference design, FIC, would confirm a screen resolution on the 10.2-inch model at 1024×600. It will also feature a 1.3-Megapixel camera, 2GB RAM, card reader, dual USB 2.0, and an express card slot.
Less details are known of the 8.9-inch model, though the specs should be similar, including resolution. The devices might be subsidized by 3G carriers like AT&T or Sprint — if they ever hit the US shores, which there’s no promise of.
We liked the Cloudbooks we’ve seen so far, and we can’t wait to see if a slightly larger model will actually be usable for those of us with big, bear-like hands. [PC Advisor, via Slashgear]
