Via Technologies, a major chipset designer from Taiwan and also a developer of x86 microprocessors, has quietly started to sell central processing units compatible with socket 479m infrastructure of Intel Corp. Potentially, this may allow the firm to sell its chips to emerging markets within systems originally developed for Intel’s processors.

Without making any announcements, Via has started to demo its Via C7-M 754 chips compatible with socket 479M infrastructure in Tokyo, Japan, according to a report by Akiba PC Hotline web-site. The new chip operates at 1.50GHz, sport 128KB level one cache (64KB data and 64KB instructions) as well as 128KB level two cache, the news-story by the Japanese web-site claims.

Via earlier confirmed that it has license to make chipsets for Intel’s processors, including the chips for the socket 479m infrastructure. But the company has always denied to comment whether it had license to manufacture the chips compatible with Intel’s sockets or not. Now it turns out that it may have rights to produce chips for Intel’s mobile sockets, but only for those, which support Celeron M or Pentium M processors, not Intel Core or Core 2 chips, which form-factor is slightly different.

Even though the new processors are only compatible with outdated socket design of the Pentium M, compatibility with platforms of the world’s leading chipmaker may provide Via opportunities to win notebook or embedded systems design in cases, when it has advantages over its giant competitor: when it comes to power consumption, Via’s chips consume much less energy.

Original Via’s C7-M processors, also known as Esther (also code-named C5J, Cyrix 4), incorporate 128KB L1 cache and 256KB of L2 cache, a 800MHz processor system bus as well as SSE, SSE and SSE3 multimedia instructions. The chips are capable of running at speeds of around 2GHz, the company’s earlier indications claim. The C7-M core extends the Via PadLock Hardware Security Suite to include execution (NX bit) protection, Montgomery Multiplier support for RSA encryption and secure Hash (SHA-1 and SHA-256) algorithms in addition to the Via PadLock RNG and Via PadLock ACE that are featured in the current Via C5P Nehemiah processors.

Via Technologies did not comment on the news-story.