Digital Home Thoughts: VIA's Attempt at Dethroning the Atom

"Compared to Atom, Nano is a bit of a beast. Both Atom and AMD’s Bobat core can fetch and issue up to two instructions. Nano can do three. Like AMD’s Bobcat, Nano has a full out of order execution engine. Atom, for the time being, is in-order. The execution engine is well matched to the front end. Nano features seven dispatch ports and can retire up to three instructions per clock. In this sense, Nano is more like AMD’s Bobcat than Intel’s Atom."

When you find yourself shopping for a computer, you will usually only see one of two names that make up the brains of your new toy; Intel or AMD. While Intel dominates the market and AMD holds on to its own sizable share of the industry, VIA still manages to hang around with its own line of x86 based CPUs. Their latest attempt with a dual-core Nano seems to be a reasonable competitor to both the mighty Atom and AMD's latest offerings with its Bobat based CPUs. VIA has had a long history with making low-power CPUs and I find it interesting that none of the major manufacturers have really embraced the Nano or its previous generations. Do they know something we do not? Or is it just a matter of brand recognition. How much does the average consumer really care of it is an Intel, AMD or VIA cpu in their computer?