VIA has announced the VN1000, the company's brand new northbridge that will feature a DirectX 10.1 graphics core, which should go nicely with the company's Nano and other processors.

The graphics in question is S3's Chrome 520 integrated graphics, which packs the same architectural traits as the Chrome 500-series: 500MHz GPU, 32 stream processors, OpenCL1.0 and Win7 Windows Desktop Driver Model 1.1. It's compatible with DisplayPort and HDMI outs, comes with hardware Blu-ray decoding capabilities and will support both DDR3 at 1066MHz and DDR2 at 800MHz. 

The IGP should easily take H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 video in hardware, although VIA lists Nano CPU at 1.6GHz as minimum requirement. There's no word of Flash hardware acceleration in the specs, although the S3 team is reportedly working on it.

The VN100 should draw up to 12W of power when combined with the VT8261 southbridge, where northbridge alone consumes 10W, but it seems like we'll see mobile version of the IGP which should consume up to 6W. Such a scenario would most probably mean that the clocks would be reduced to 400MHz, but we can't confirm that as of yet.

We should see some VN1000 implementations in time for CES, when we'll know more on the subject.