VIA Nano confirmed as driving force behind Samsung NC20

By Will Stapley on Fri 27 February 2009

It’s something of a struggle to find a netbook running off anything other than Intel’s Atom processor – be it the Atom 270 or 280.

Samsung seems to have faith in one of Intel’s rival’s, though, namely VIA.

Thanks to an official release from VIA, we can now confirm that Samsung’s NC20 will be powered by a VIA Nano CPU - the U2250 to be precise.

Despite Samsung’s NC10 running off an Atom chip, this news doesn’t come as a total surprise. As we reported earlier this month, it was widely believed that Samsung would switch to VIA with the NC20. More after the break.

The Nano CPU has a clock speed of 1.3GHz and 800MHz front-side bus. On paper, it’s a fair bit slower than Intel’s Atom, but clock speeds aren’t everything and we’ll wait until our NC20 review sample arrives before delivering a final verdict.

Other NC20 specs include a 12.1-inch screen with a 1,280x800-pixel resolution, 1Gb RAM and a 160Gb hard drive, making it a fair bit beefier than most of the netbooks out there. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Windows XP Home also come as standard.

There’s no official word on availability or pricing, but you can find the Samsung NC20 available for pre-order on various sites. Amazon has it at £379 and says it will have the netbook in stock this coming Sunday.

Samsung’s NC10 was certainly a popular netbook, but we’ll have to wait and see whether the company’s faith in VIA’s Nano chip pays off and if it prompts other manufacturers to follow suit. With AMD seemingly happy to let this whole netbook thing drift by, we certainly hope VIA can provide Intel with a bit of competition.

[VIA via Register Hardware]