VIA is no stranger to the netbook game. But thanks to Intel’s dominance of the netbook chip market, you don’t hear much from the company these days. But that hasn’t kept VIA from building new energy efficient chips. The latest VIA paltform combines a VIA Nano CPU with a VIA VX900 graphics processor to enable HD video playback on low power netbooks.

Sascha from Netbook News got a chance to check out a test system with a 1.2GHz Nano U3100 processor and VX900 graphics chipset with HD Chromation 2.0. The chipset allows you to watch 1080p HD video out of the box. In order to achieve the same thing with an Intel Atom chipset (on Windows at least), you need a media coprocessor like the Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator or a separate graphics card like NVIDIA’s ION platform. The VX900 chipset can handle both local HD content and 1080p HD Flash video streaming from the web.

Sascha says we should start to see systems using the new chipset in June — although that’s when they’ll show up at the Computex trade show. It might be a bit longer before we actually start to see them in stores.

You can check out Sascha’s video after the break.

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5 replies on “VIA’s new platform for HD video capable netbooks”

  1. Too early to tell, but this feels like great news. Any competition to Intel is a good thing; the market desperately needs it.

  2. doesnt Broadcom only work on local files through WMP & with the proper drivers/codecs?

    it would be more fair to compare VIA’s solution to ION.

    besides, playing HD is no accomplishment. what matters is the power/performance watt ratio. anybody can through alot of power at something to play HD, but if its done sloppily with alot of inefficient wattage than nothing has been accomplished.

    1. Amen! They were supposed to support Linux with the C7-M chips, but getting the Everex CloudBooks to run any flavor of Linux was an exercise in frustration. I sold mine, and will never buy another VIA device unless there is already fully working Linux drivers. A promise to support Linux means nothing!

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