The mini-desktop, or nettop as Intel prefers, has garnered its own wee corner in the news recently due to the announcement of products from Lenovo, Asus and even more recently Zotac. All are nettops flush with the graphical goodness that is the Nvidia ION platform. Actually, truth be told, Nvidia doesn't have a platform. A platform should technically consists of a chipset and a CPU, which is exactly what VIA have with their C7 and Nano processors. Nvidia chipsets currently rely on Intel Atom CPUs for air.

VIA have recently paired their CPU offerings with the new VX855 chipset which is similar in some respects to the Nvidia 9300/9400 chip, in that it can do a fairly good job of taking the pain away from the CPU in HD video tasks. This makes the chipset handy in low powered netbooks and nettops etc, which typically struggle to do anything connected to H.264 video due to the under-powered Atom and its less than HD savvy 945GSE chipset.

Western Opportunity Analysis:

We've no idea of price just yet for this VIA nettop system, and specs are still thin on the ground. We can tell you that it will have a HDMI port and do 1080p HD video at resolutions up to 1920x1440 without sweating too much. The unnamed shanzhai manufacturer responsible for it will no doubt be hoping that systems based on the VIA platform can compete with ION systems in a relatively dead market. At prices of as much as 580 USD, nettops are not an easy sell, especially when you can fork out a similar wad of a cash for a dual or quad core monster in the traditional tower form factor. I think successes in the markets of Shanzhen would happen only at sub-250 USD price points.