Netbooks and VIA enjoy gains

John Peddie research has released figures showing a jump in growth for the GPU market, including sales increases for VIA of 100% in the last quarter. The growth has been accounted for because of IGPs being used in notebooks and netbooks, sales of which increased by 27% in Q2. Fast on the heals of the announcement that the US has climbed out of recession, things are also looking up for GPU manufacturers - except for Nvidia, which lost 4% market share in the same period.

"A total of 119.45 million units were shipped in the third quarter, exceeding the record 111 million units in the third quarter of 2008," said Dr Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

"So the market has caught up with, and exceeded, last year's highs. The crash of Autumn 2008 is now behind us." - V3.co.uk

Asus Eee clone with VIA Nano

China, there is a growing business of manufacturers who take a design from a major manufacturer and copy it, altering it a bit but keeping the look fairly similar. In this case the EEE 1002HA Asus netbook design has been copied, but on the inside is a VIA Nano processor instead of an Atom.

"The VIA NANO runs at a clock speed of 1.3GHz. VIA’s new VX855 chipset allows one to enjoy 1080p videos on the tiny 10-inch screen of this cloned netbook and that too with jus 20-30% CPU utilization." - Gadgetmix

More Shanzai-nanagans

The Asus Eee PCs have probably been a bit of a thorn in VIA's netbook side really. All that mighty Asus/Intel marketing, touting their little netbooks as revolutionary, while at the same time, VIA's NanoBook reference design churned out masses of similar devices in China. It's in the great PC manufacturing giant that is China that we find ourselves again today with news of an ironic turn of events, an Asus Eee PC clone which features a VIA Nano processor.

"Incidentally, the VIA Nano processor is touted to perform better than the Atom under selected circumstances, and when priced lower, it does make for an alluring replacement. No idea on whether the knockoff will sell similar to the Eee PC 1002HA's price range, but we're probably looking at something more wallet-friendly."