Lunch at Pieros

Piero's Italian Restaurant is an excellent establish whose owner is connected to the consumer electronics industry. Thus, every year at the restaurant, which is within a mere few hundred feet of the Las Vegas Convention Center, several companies show off their new technologies. Many of the companies which display are start-ups or lesser known companies, but a few are extremely well-known.

VIA

VIA is the main exhibitor at Pieros. The company showed off its relatively new Nano processor, clocking in up to 1.6 GHz. Several companies, such as Shuttle, Foxconn, and Pegatron (a subsidiary of ASUS), adopted the Nano into designs targetted for the consumer PC and home theater PC markets. The Trinity architecture—a combination of the VIA Nano processor, Chrome graphics chipset, and VIA VX series system board— are sufficiently powerful for Blu-ray playback, as evidenced by a display shown at the event. The target market for the Trinity platform is the home theater PC market.

VIA's reference design for netbooks is also in heavy implentation, as evidenced by the veritable army of small devices throughout the room. The hardware isn't much different than last year's introduction of the Nano reference design, save faster processors and larger screens, plus arguably larger keyboards.

Notably, VIA showed an extremely inexpensive ARM-based netbook running Windows CE, offered by UNI-V and coordinated/manufactured by VIA's Wondermedia subsidiary. This Prizm platform netbook is targetted for the super mobile market, wherein a user will acquire the device through a contract with a celluar service company, not unlike how phones are subsidized nowadays. This video is rather uneventful, other than showing that the same technology which drives the netbook also drives a network and disc-based media player device. There is also a special YouTube player which can be used on the device.