VIA Technologies of Taiwan has finally launched its long-awaited next-generation low-power CPU line, previously codenamed Isaiah. They have been unveiled under the brand name Nano yesterday and the series consists of five processors, of which two are intended for higher performance and more power while the other consume very little power at the expense of some processing muscle.

The high-performance L-series includes L2200 which runs at 1.8Ghz and L2100 which runs at 1.6GHz, both featuring 1Mb of L2 cache. The first takes 25W of power while the latter consumes only 17W. The ultra-low-voltage models run at 1 to 1.3GHz with power draws of only 5 to 8 Watts. The new CPUs feature support for virtualization.

Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, the Via subsidiary that designed the processor, told PC World that he is certain their CPUs are faster than Intel's Atom technology. It appears that VIA's offering is somewhere between Intel Atom and the Celerons in terms of performance.

Compared to VIA's older processors, the new Nano architecture offers two to four times the performance of the C7, depending upon the benchmark used. VIA's catch is that the new Nanos are compatible with the sockets used by their successful C7 CPUs, which means that things already designed for the C7 will be able to take in a newer, more powerful processor.