Intel is loosing the battle against VIA in the UMPC field

Well, at least that's my opinion after analyzing two years of fiascos coming from Intel. Last year was completely lost because the best that Intel could release was the A110 and A100, two processors that did not give a extra battery life worth to mention because we have plenty of examples of other UMPC using even Core Solo with about the same battery life. The A110 and A100 performance was about the same than what we see in the second generation of VIA processors. Now Intel just released the Atom. And what we have there, lets check this chart posted at JKonTheRun.

 

Once again the new processor from Intel specially designed for UMPC and MID performs worse than the old Celeron M at 900 MHz. There are even few reports about A110 processors out performing this Atom score. So for two years on the road Intel has not been able to release a better processor from the point of view of performance and there are some reports that the Atom even does not support Aero in Vista. If you compare this to what is going on with VIA processors you will see a different picture there. VIA has upgraded its processors for UMPC two times in the same period and in both cases we have seen a gain in performance and battery life. So, who is winning this battle? Evidently VIA. VIA processor still do not out perform in some cases the A110 and Atom processors in performance but if they continue doing what they have been doing I wont be surprised to see a faster VIA processor before this year ends.