The low-power dual-core processor that VIA are dubbing the “Nano 3000″ looks to be something that can rival Intel’s almost monopoly-esque Atom processor, with power consumption that should be far less than the Atom. It will also reportedly feature SSE4 instruction support (Streaming SIMD Extensions 4), integer/floating point enhancements, and improved internal cache performance.

The dual-core version of the Nano 3000, which may use a Fujitsu 45-nanometer or TSMC 40-nanometer manufacturing process, could start shipping out samples this quarter, with a full release then to follow later this year. If all goes to plan, this should be a huge boost for the already flourishing netbook market and will also reduce the mundanity for us netbook bloggers in typing “features the Intel Atom…” for virtually every new netbook release!

The companies signed a cooperation agreement in April of this year that was to have seen VIA’s C7 and Nano CPUs paired with MCP79 IGP chipsets from Nvidia, but for still unknown reasons these plans have come to a grinding halt. Electronista brought up Apple’s rumoured plan to be working on a tablet- or netbook-like device that could require full cooperation from NVIDIA and could be a plausible explanation for the breakdown in these plans.

VIA said that they and NVIDIA do still plan to cooperate and showcase desktop PC products at CES 2009, despite cooperation on their netbook platform being suspended.