Taiwanese chipmaker Via Technologies announced its new line of low-powered “Nano” processors, originally codenamed “Isaiah” on Thursday, and is poise to compete with rival Intel’s Atom line. The new chips are designed for products that run on less energy.

The company claims the new processor’s offer up to four times the performance of Via’s C7 processor line while featuring the same power requirements.

The new chips will be aimed at the low-cost PC and ultra mobile PC markets, Via Tech’s Nano will Battle it out with Intel’s Atom chip for business from original device manufacturers (ODM’s) and original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s) such as HP and Asus.

Systems featuring the new chips will be in the shops for the third quarter of 2008.

The technology is based on Fujitsu’s 65-nanometer process technology which means the chips offer increased performance balanced by enhance power efficiency. The new line of 64-bit processors includes a superscaler speculative out-of-order architecture, enabling the processor to execute more than one instruction at a time and significantly improve performance.

Two L-series (low voltage) processors for mainstream desktop and mobile PC’s and three U-series (ultra low voltage) processors for small form factor desktops and ultra mobile devices make up the single-core Nano chip line.

With the high-speed, low power Via V4 Front Side Bus, starting at 800 MHz, plus a high floating point unit, support for new SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) instructions, and two 64 KB L1 caches and 1 MB exclusive L2 cache with 16-way associability, multimedia performance has also received a boost in the Nano.

Ian Lao, an In-Stat analyst said, “This is very cool that they have released [Nano] finally,”

“These guys get the fact that you’re not always going to be near power, and you have to maximize that, balancing out a deployment with good enough battery life,” he said.

“They’re pretty good for PCs, where the expected lifetime on a battery is four to five hours. Consumer expectations for battery performance on a device are growing.”