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I suspect that Isaiah was renamed Nano in response to Intel's Atom. Small 4 letter names for small cpus. (I guess). Although Isaiah was likely always intended as a non-marketing codeword, I believe someone at VIA even mentioned that before.

Hey, hold on. The press release [via.com.tw] has a little table which is worth reading. The above sentence should read:

Like the old joke "the watch is tiny but look at the battery I have to carry in a suitcase" take a look at this photo [blogsmithmedia.com].

That's the CPU in the foreground, passively heated, oo groovy. But wait, what's that huge heatsink with the fan ?!
Intel have offloaded all the power requirements into the northbridge. That way they can say "our CPU is 2.5w matey".

Oh, and it was supposed to ship June '08 but that's been quitely cancelled so no MSI Wind for you for the near future.

1) Intel specify typical TDP. VIA's is max TDP.

2) Intel's desktop Atom (Diamondville) is 4W, not 2.5W.

3) Intel's chipsets are 4x4s in comparison to the moped-like Atom, thus power consumption is widely unbalanced. VIA have a single-chip solution, but I don't know the power consumption.

4) CPUs spend most of their time in idle - Nano uses 100mW here for all but the highest-end Nano.

5) Nano is more powerful per clock than Atom.

Trying to compare the two processors with the amount of information available on them right now is pretty silly in general. Clock speed comparisons are even more silly considering the vastly different architectures (single-issue, in-order vs three-issue, out-of-order) and cache sizes (24K L1-I, 32K L1-D, 512K 8-way L2 vs 64k L1-I, 64K L1-D, 1024K 16-way L2).

Power comparisons are a bit premature at this point as well. Noone knows what typical consumption is at this point; just idle and max. A lot depends on how effective the power management is in each processor. Depending on the performance delta between the chips it's also possible that a higher maximum TDP won't always be the disadvantage it seems to be; if the Via chip has higher instruction throughput, it means it can return to idle state that much quicker.

There's also the question of the whole platform, as well. The chipset from Intel manages an impressive TDP (about 2.3W) but is somewhat limited - only 400/533MHz FSB, low max resolution (1366x768 LVDS or 1280x1024 SDVO), one DDR2 400/533Mhz slot, only two 1x PCI-e ports, no SATA and only one PATA channel. So far as I know there are no hard numbers of graphics performance since they're integrating a licensed design (PowerVR SGX535) that has traditionally been used in embedded devices. However their own slideshows comparing the capabilities with their (over four year old!) 915G chipset show about half the memory bandwidth and less than a third the pixel rate. In other words, pretty piss poor. They do, however, include hardware acceleration for most common codecs, which should minimize the impact in their target market.

The new chipset Via is offering - the VX800 - consumes far more power at peak (though as with the processor this may or may not reflect typical depending on how the power management is implemented) but is a bit more featureful - 800MHz bus, up to 1920x1200, two DDR2 667MHz slots, a 4x PCI-e slot in addition to the two 1x slots, two SATA 2.0 ports and video capture support. They also offer a lower power version - the VX800u - which drops the peak TDP to 3.5W but drops the bus to 400MHz and nixes the 4x PCI-e slot and SATA ports.

My take is that the Intel offering is probably better suited to certain embedded applications as well as the MID market. The main market these two will likely compete in is the burgeoning UMPC market. Without real performance and power numbers it's hard to say who has the edge. More likely than not which chip is best will depend entirely on what trade-offs the manufacturer is willing to make.