Steve Paine, our friendly moderator known as chippy, has written an excellent report comparing the Intel and VIA chipsets that are vying for Ultra-Mobile PC supremecy. Intel checks in with the Pentium-M and Celeron-M low-voltage CPU’s while VIA steps up with the C7-M ultra-low-voltage (ulv) CPUs.
[b]The 1st-Gen UMPC/Origami devices have already chosen sides:[/b]
In Intel’s corner: Asus R2H, Founder Mininote, Samsung Q1, ECS H70
In VIA’s corner: PaceBlade SmartCaddie, TabletKiosk V-700
Please check out the [url=http://blog.carrypad.com/2006/03/origami-cpu-overview.html]whole article on Steve’s ‘Time for the Carrypad?’ blog[/url].
[b]Here are some interesting excerpts:[/b]
…The Celeron-M devices are Pentium-M devices with a reduced L2 cache and importantly, speed-stepping removed. They are offered as a lower cost alternative to the Pentiums saving something in the region of $80 in component costs to the manufacturers…
…Via’s offering is the VN800 and VT8237 combination as its solution. It has a 400/533 or 800mhz FSB, supports 4GB of RAM and graphics is provided by the Unicrome pro graphics processor. Via also include the Via vinyl hi-def audio solution a TV encoder, hardware-assisted MPEG2 decoding and de-interlacing…
…On the face of it, VIA looks to have a strong offering for ultra mobile PC devices. With their lower power, faster speed-stepping and integrated MPEG and TV outputs theres some significant advantages. On the other hand, the Intel Pentium CPU is going to be the more powerful choice. The Celeron is going to be cheap but with its lack of speed-stepping, is going to be probably the most power-hungry of the CPU’s…
Now, we can all sit back and see who comes out on top in this battle of the chips.
