Finally, the first benchmarks of VIA's Nano processor has arrived and it looks like it's almost all good news for VIA. The EPIA-SN motherboard, which seems to be the only platform at the moment using a Nano processor, isn't what we'd call a consumer friendly board, but it has some interesting features nonetheless.

Although, for some reason, none of the reviewers actually tried it, the board has a x16 PCIe slot which will accept a standard PCIe graphics card. Instead, all of the benchmarks were done with the integrated graphics, which is really the low-point of the reviews as the graphics performance was the only bit that made the Nano look bad compared to the Atom, but this is something VIA could remedy with a better chipset than the CN896.

What really stood out in both of the reviews we found, is the fact that VIA's single-core, single-threaded Nano managed to beat a Hyperthreaded Atom in benchmarks like PovRay, CineBench and Lame MT and doing so by a significant margin. We're not talking a couple of percent here, as the VIA Nano was 50 seconds faster in the Lame MT test on a single thread compared to the Atom running Hyperthreading and it scored over 200 points better in CineBench R10.

It's not a pure apples to apples comparison, though, as the EPIA-SN was using a 1.8GHz Nano, while the Intel mini-ITX D945G board only has a 1.6GHz Atom processor, but we doubt the 200MHz difference would allow Intel to catch up. Overall, this is an impressive show from VIA, now we'd just like to see a better chipset and some notebooks with a Nano in them; oh, and some product availability.

You can find the reviews here and here.