Asus Eee PC 1002H clone emerges

This Chinese piece plays HD videos!

Shanzhaiben.com, a sister concern of Shanzai.com, reports a netbook that is a clone of the Asus Eee PC 1002H but features the latest chipset from VIA, which apparently can play HD video! The way these Chinese brands come up is amazing – you get a cheaper but exact-replica of the original piece, maybe not a brand-value, but there is always a buyer.

“It's been a year now since VIA Technologies launched their GMB alliance - a project that brings together key manufacturing and infrastructure partners players in Shanzhen. The idea being that by working closely with the manufacturing base in China, VIA will see improved up take of its processors, luring the shanzhai crowd away from Intel. One of the tempters that VIA is using to achieve this is it's HD capable VIA VX855 chipset, featured on their surfboard reference design (below), a specially designed netbook main board that is being offered to partners in the GMB” – reported by Shanzai.com.

The netbook market has for long been dominated by Intel’s Atom N270 and Atom N280 processors. This is because Intel has made a brand name for itself. It occupies the largest market share in terms of notebook processors, the only formidable foe being AMD. AMD has not yet launched a processor built specifically for netbooks, whereas, Intel had released the Atom processor long ago. Intel had foreseen that the netbook category has the potential to grow big and hence it launched the Atom processor which is dedicated for netbooks only. This helped Intel to increase its market share in the netbook segment. As a result Chinese manufacturers are shifting from Atom based netbooks to AMD and VIA based netbooks, with screen sizes greater than 12” already being taken care of. Although, the Chinese manufacturers are developing netbooks with screen size greater than 12”, the point remains, whether these low power processors will be able to power these high resolution displays. We will have to wait to have a glimpse of these netbooks.

According to a report by Digitimes, this trend will soon change because Chinese white box netbook manufacturers are reportedly starting to build mini-laptops equipped with VIA and AMD processors as an alternative to the Intel Atom-powered netbooks. The reason for this shift is that there is an increase on demand of VIA and AMD based netbooks. Moreover, VIA processors cost half as much as Intel Atom processors. Intel has also placed a limit on the screen size of netbooks running on the Atom processor. This restricts manufacturers from experimenting with different screen sizes. These clones are definitely a result of that effort, giving consumers more choices at least.

The new VIA VX855 chipset apparently offers something that the Atom cannot - decent HD video playback capability. The VX855 facilitates hardware-based acceleration for video which enables the chipset to accelerate the video independently, leaving the CPU free to go about its day.