VIA launched itself against Intel’s Centrino mobile platform today when it unveiled Antaur, a mobile version of its C3 desktop processor.
We say ‘mobile version’ but we’re really just talking about little more than a rebranded C3. The C3, particularly in its latest incarnations, based on the Nehemiah core, has been targeted at low-power applications, and VIA has often touted its strengths in fanless, zero-noise systems.
I have a C3 533MHz board sitting next to me running Red Hat 8.0. The C3 seems to be great for running stuff like word processing, browsing, SSH terminals and the sort. It does tend to choke on more processor-intensive tasks. The first time I noticed this was when decoding a speex file. It brought the system to a halt and produced a couple of unusable files.
I wouldn’t try to do realtime audio or video on the 533MHz C3, but for day to day stuff, it’s fine.