VIA might not be the company it once was, but its Nano range of processors showed a lot of promise, although we’re still waiting for the big breakthrough. Hopefully the new, improved 3000-series of VIA Nano processors can improve upon its predecessors lukewarm reception.

The two major advantages of the 3000-series over the 2000-series is increased performance by an average of 20 percent and a reduction in power usages by again an average of 20 percent.

This might not seem like much, but VIA has kindly provided some benchmarks which you can find in the slide show below and they’ve compared a 1.6GHz Nano 3000-series processor (although, oddly enough there’s no such product) to Intel’s Atom N270 processor which is also clocked at 1.6GHz.

The difference between the Nano and the Atom processor is much larger than that between the two Nano iterations and if VIA is set to be Nvidia’s new partner on the ION platform, then we might just have some interesting hardware to look forward to. The performance of the 3000-series Nano processors is still a long way from Intel’s other product offerings, but they also consume far less power.

VIA will be offering models with clock speed ranging from 1GHz to 2GHz, although the 1.8 and 2GHz models use more power than the 1.4GHz and below models. All models operates on an 800MHz bus and are pin-to-pin compatible with previous generation of VIA processors.

We’d really like to see VIA do something a little bit more powerful and we’re still waiting for VIA to come up with a decent chipset that incorporates all the features that you’d expect to see in a modern thin and light notebook, but maybe Nvidia’s next generation of ION will solve this problem once and for all, fingers crossed.

You can find the product page here for more details.