[citation][nom]juliom[/nom]Can't see why it does... Nano is actually a pretty good CPU for it's market.[/citation]
The problem is, what is the market? I got a fanless one, that ran at 800 MHz, and found my 400 MHz, underclocked K6-III+ outperformed it, and ran cooler.
Atom blows it away on low power benchmarks, and once you start moving up, you're often better off with an underclocked Celeron or Pentium based on the Core 2, as you get much better bang for the watt. They're products simply had no real market. They used too much power to compete with Atom well, and you'd have to clock them so low to reach Atom power levels, they couldn't compete in performance. But, once you start getting into where they could beat the Atom, then there was Intel's Core 2 line.
Considering Via is probably exaggerating, as companies always do, it's not clear if this will help them enough. They aren't that far off, so if they got 20% performance and 20% lower power use, they'd be very competitive, but it's probably 5% performance on most benchmarks, and 15% lower power. I don't think Centaur did enough. If it's just a revision, it's still impression. But, if this is their move to 45nm, it's a disappointment. Also, consider they still don't have a DX10 chipset.
On the plus side, the idle draw is down to 100mw, and the ultra low power version is 1.4 GHz instead of 1.3 GHz, so it's progress. But, Atom is improving soon, too. So, we'll have to see. I've always pulled for Centaur since their original Winchips, and thought they had a great idea and would be successful. So far, though, I've been nothing but wrong.