While Via may be suffering in the performance desktop chipset market, they are extremely popular for embedded, low power and small form factor PCs. In a press release issued today, Via has announced their CN800 Desktop Platform. It has support for both DDR and DDR2, though DDR2-533 is the highest it can go. It has integrated UniChrome Pro graphics, as well as an external AGP and PCI-Ex x16 slot. None of those are particularly exciting, but the new platform also comes with the features that make it stand out as an ideal media platform, including hardware MPEG-2 decompression support, Vinyl audio and of course a very low power demand.
This new platform is designed around Via's C7 series processors, and will probably make an appearance in MicroITX form.