Asus clone uses VIA chipset; adds HD playback

It's been a year now since VIA Technologies launched their GMB alliance, a project that brings together key manufacturing and infrastructure partners players in Shanzhen. The idea being that by working closely with the manufacturing base in China, VIA will see improved up take of its processors, luring the shanzhai crowd away from Intel. One of the tempters that VIA is using to achieve this is it's HD capable VIA VX855 chipset, featured on their surfboard reference design (below), a specially designed netbook mainboard that is being offered to partners in the GMB.

Above: The VIA Surfboard, featuring the VIA Nano processor and HD savvy VIA VX855 chipset. VIA hope that their GMB partners will start pumping out affordable, HD capable netbooks based on this reference design.

The new VIA VX855 chipset is supposed to offer something that Intel's Atom product line cannot; namely decent HD video playback. The Atom processor has been the driving force of the netbook craze of the last year or so, and it wasn't exactly blistering in terms of performance. In fact Intel were reluctant to talk it up at all, preferring to direct you towards their mainstream (read more expensive) Core 2 Duo line up to provide your 1080p video (at least if you want playback that doesn't look like a slideshow).

According to VIA, the VX855 is about to change our perspective on netbook performance, especially where video playback is concerned. The VX855 is similar to many IGP chipsets in that it includes hardware-based acceleration for video; meaning that the chipset can take care of the video, leaving the CPU free to go about its day. Sounds great in theory, but in reality most hardware acceleration fails to live up to its billing. VIA tell us that this time it's different.  The VX855 is the real deal.

Above: A VIA VX855 armed netbook playing 1080p content while staying under 20 watts for they whole system. This would indeed indicate that the VX855 is taking the brunt of the work load.

Western Opportunity Analysis:

If this is all true, then Intel will be less than pleased. Not only are the Shenzhen plouging own their field in terms of screen size, they'll now have the opportunity to offer more notebook-like performance on a netbook product. These are two areas where Intel wants control. It wants to differentiate between netbooks - which it says are small, under-perform and sell for peanuts; and notebooks - which are larger, high-performance machines that cost way more.  Thus protecting their profit margins on their higher performance components.

Here are some snaps of a Shanzhai machine fitted out with the VIA platform. Kinda looks like an ASUS 1002H.

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