VIA or Intel For My UMPC?

You might be wondering why some UMPC's, most notably, HP's 2133 Mini-note uses a VIA processor. What's with VIA anyway? Is it the AMD processor equivalent for netbooks?

 

Just a brief background, When the Asus Eee PC came out, it used the Celeron M processor that runs at 900MHz. In response, VIA created the C7-M processor to grab some market at the so-called Netbook category and it had some success with Packard Bell, Maxdata, and Everex to name a few using it on their machines. The problem was, even at 1.2GHz ,VIA C7-M was not as fast as Intel's Celeron M and it runs even hotter.

Then Intel Atom came, which is much faster than VIA C7-M at 1.6GHz for netbooks. Not to mention being less energy-consuming which leads to a much cooler machine. Here are some numbers between the two for you geeks:

Processor	VIA C7-M ULV	Intel Atom
Model	772	230
L2 Cache	128KB	512KB
Clock Speed	1.2GHz	1.6GHz
FSB	400MHz	544MHz
Thermal Design Power	5w	4w
Architecture (lower nm, less power consumption)	90nm	45nm

So as of now if it were me, I would rather go for Intel Atom-based UMPC's instead of VIA even if VIA is much cheaper. However, VIA and Nvidia have joined forces to take on Intel in the chip-world of UMPC's and they'll be releasing VIA Isaiah soon which promises to be a big improvement from C7-M. So we'll see how the near future shapes up for the two.