NVIDIA Collaboration With VIA to Fight Intel in Low Cost Vista Platform

During the recent financial analyst meeting, NVIDIA has announced the new plan to develop a low cost but yet good graphics performance system for consumer market. The cost range is expected to fall below $45 that claimed to be the most affordable Vista premium platform in the world. If you recall, the price for the cheapest Intel Atom processor, Z500 series is also around $45 and now the same price seems to be able to cover both the core, chipset and basic peripherals to build up the whole system.

The platform is believed to be powered by VIA Isaiah processor pairing with NVIDIA IGP that are able to boost up the graphics performance significantly. According to earlier performance benchmarking data, VIA Isaiah definitely has better performance against its current C7-M processor. Also, NVIDIA claimed that the pairing using Isaiah and NVIDIA IGP can scale up to 36 GFLOPS, as compared to only 6.4 GFLOPS of what typical Intel Celeron-based processor with 945/ICH4 chipset can offer. Preliminary announcement disclosed that the system will support Blu-ray HD, DX10 and etc.

I am hoping that the partnership between VIA and NVIDIA can put a good fight against Intel’s series of low cost processor such as the recent launch’s Atom processor and Atom Centrino platform in entry level market in terms of performance besides pricing. No doubt, pairing with NVIDIA stands a great advantage in graphics performance while VIA is able to bring down the cost to build up an affordable Vista ready system.