VIA makes tons of processors that you probably never really think about. Embedded stuff, stuff that ends up in factories, point-of-sale machines and small, integrated computers. Not often do VIA chips make their way out into the land of the average tech consumer, but a few of them have managed to power low-drain handheld devices, nettops, netbooks, etc. But now, VIA is looking to make a serious push into the desktop realm...or at least the small desktop realm.


At the Computex trade show in Taiwan, the company demonstrated a new dual-core CPU meant for low-drain desktops, the Nano DC. It was running at 1.6GHz and supported DDR3 memory, and while it was built around a 65nm process technology, the company says it will be built on a "next generation" platform when the final version is ready to ship in around six months.


The dual-core Nano has been around in VIA's labs for awhile now, and it has been seemingly delayed as the Atom has gained strength in the netbook market. But the Atom really needs competition; AMD has a few low-drain chips in a few netbooks, but a third player would truly shake things up. The demo showed the CPU playing back a 720p movie with ease, but it still isn't quite ready for notebook use. Getting it out into nettops would be a great first step, and thermals can always be tweaked once a finalized product is made available.