Unrelated to the earlier story about a possible MID platform from NVidia is this story that first surfaced about a month ago through Digitimes. They reported on an agreement between VIA and NVidia to co-operate on a low-cost notebook platform and according to research presented by EeePCNews last month, the VN platform would combine a ‘C8′ Isaiah and an Nvidia chipset to form a low-cost notebook platform. According to an Nvidia-sourced slide it looks like the initial aim is a Vista-capable netbook. While a screemer of an XP machine would be my preference, as we move forward and past XP end-of-life dates and towards a Windows 7 product, higher-powered netbooks will become more important. A higher processing power is also going to enable lower-cost primary notebook PCs for many and not just a ring-fenced class of Ultra Low Cost PC (ULCPC) devices. Low cost 1st-tier notebooks could impact the notebook market in a far more serious way than the 2nd-tier Eee PC did.

Image from a ComputerBase article. 12th April

CNet report that an announcement will come from VIA just before Computex which starts on the 3rd June. I could be wrong but its seems obvious to me that the April news and this announcement are one and the same thing.

Via will provide the central processing unit and motherboard, plus the core logic (chipset) solution, while Nvidia will provide the graphics processing unit, said Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia’s platform products division.  Nvidia will offer standalone “discrete” graphics for both notebook and desktop platforms using the Isaiah chip, Henry said.

Note that this is a ‘discrete’ GeForce graphics solution so the size of the motherboard and the power drain will be relatively high (compared to UMPC and MID platforms.) ‘Cheap’ ‘Vista’ ‘Notebook’ seem to be the keywords here and while this might not be that interesting for the UMPC market at the moment, the Isaiah technology is an important one and will filter into the UMPC market as it is refined. These early products will give us a good idea of performance.

The news broke a few days through Digitimes that VIA are set to migrate their CPU’s to 45nm production by late 2009. Moving to a smaller production process means watt usage should decrease or that processing power can be increased without increasing watt usage. This move is remarkable because their first 65nm CPU (Isaiah architecture) is yet to ship.

The Isaiah CPU is said to be introduced with a 2Ghz clock speed which makes it unlikely this will be a ULV CPU, as we already speculated before. When a ULV version will be available has not yet been announced but it is not expected before the end of 2008.