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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VIA's new platform for HD video capable netbooks
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