By Joel Hruska
January 04, 2009 - 10:00PM CT

I was quite impressed with VIA's Nano when we put the chip to a head-to-head battle against Intel's Atom, but a good deal of that luster has faded in the past six months. For all the processor's potential, we have yet to see a single major North American product launch that would put the chip in the hands of interested buyers.

Fortunately, that's about to change. One bit of news that slipped past us during the holiday season is that Samsung intends to launch a Nano-powered system (the NC20) with a 12.1" screen, Windows XP, 1GB of RAM, and 160GB of hard drive space. Multiple websites have listed the processor as a 1.3GHz Nano U225 with support for a 1333MHz FSB.

That's not a designation that fits within Nano's current nomenclature for its "U" class processors, but for the moment we'll assume it's accurate. The NC20 should be on display at CES; expect a report on our impressions. VIA, meanwhile, has been busy refining Nano's architecture, but there has been some online confusion over what, exactly, the company is doing. At present, there are two Nano processors in the pipeline.

The first, as best we know, is a dual-core Nano based on what VIA internally refers to as the Nano 2000 architecture. Each of the two processors on this die will apparently be identical to a standard Nano, and the company would likely adopt Intel's MCM approach rather than attempting to build a unified dual-core like AMD. VIA expects to launch this part in the first half of 2009.