VIA has been very quiet recently, especially in the UK. Although it had a stand at Computex this year, there was really very little in terms of new products on display.

Then, out of nowhere, this socket-479 processor appears on a Japanese website, without any mention of it from VIA.

Admittedly, VIA seems to have been planning a socket-479 part for some time - rumours were around at CeBIT two years ago that such a part would be available.

The processor in question is based on the C7 core and is a mobile part with model number 754, which indicates that it's clocked at 1.5GHz. VIA has a range of mobile processors listed on its website, but there's no indication what interface these processors use.

According to VIA, these processors only work with the VIA VN800 chipsets, but judging from the information on Akiba the socket-479 works just fine on an Intel 915G platform.

Based on this information one has to wonder how different the VIA C7 bus is from that of the Intel Pentium M processors.

Apparently, the BIOS doesn't recognise the C7 processors correctly, but the system booted up into Windows without any problems.

VIA C7-M socket-479 on the right compared to an Intel Pentium M

With 64kb L1 and 128kb L2 cache, the VIA C7 is hardly a competitor for the Pentium M in terms of performance. But there's no reason why VIA couldn't eat away at Intel's entry level market share if all that is needed is a simple BIOS upgrade. ®

Related stories

• VIA preps UMPC-friendly chipset (7 July 2006)
• VIA preps single-chip C7, Eden chipset (5 April 2006)
• VIA ships C7-M ULV with Intel-like model numbers (13 March 2006)
• VIA ships 90nm Eden low-power processor (17 January 2006)
• VIA preps C7-oriented 'mini PC' chipset (8 December 2005)