Most budget notebooks around house different varieties of Intel processors. Now that Lenovo has announced its IdeaPad S12 it does it with the same low prices as the competition, but other than that the computer is quite different from the rest. First of all S12 comes with a relatively large 12″ screen with 1280×800 pixel resolution. It also offers several different solutions for performance chips inside the computer, not just the Ion based model we told you about earlier.
Lenovo has a version of S12 that is based entirely on VIA’s chips; VIA Nano ULV 2250 1.3GHz processor for crunching and VIA’s integrated chipset with Chrome9 HC3 graphics. This is paired with 1GB DDR2 memory, 160GB harddrive and 6 cell lithium-ion battery.
The base model of the VIA version costs around $50 less than the Intel sibling with 1.6GHz Atom processor and 945 chipset. The difference in performance is something we hope to learn more about, but we would suspect the VIA model being faster, much thanks to the better and more up-to-date chipset.
