On a bright morning in December, people gathered near Bourem Inaly, Mali, to get a look at a dozen PCs powered by 175-watt solar energy grids the size of a dining room table. Most had never seen a computer, nor did they know much about the Internet.

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Bourem Inaly is on an island in the Niger River, near Timbuktu, a 25-minute motorized pirogue ride from the mainland. Its hot, dusty climate is perfect for testing the mobile kiosk-based PCs being used in the Cybertigi project, a program run by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Geekcorps unit of the International Executive Service Corps, a nonprofit group specializing in technology and business development in less developed areas.

Behind the scenes is VIA Technologies, a Taiwanese semiconductor designer that donated the 1-GHz, 12-watt chips; generic computers; and monitors that are linked to a Nokia 770 mobile phone, printer, scanner, and digital camera. Cybertigi is one of several initiatives VIA has sponsored to highlight the need for low-power processors and computers in more remote areas.

The low-power draw of VIA's chips frees users from traditional energy source restrictions, "opening up whole new deployment possibilities in these regions," says VIA VP of marketing Richard Brown.

On the for-profit side of its business, the 20-year-old company barely carves out 1% of the x86 market, where Intel dominates with 74% of the market and Advanced Micro Devices follows with 25%. In addition to its core microprocessor business, VIA designs embedded chips, chipsets, and communications components for PCs, servers, and mobile and industrial devices.

VIA's focus is on getting the best performance for the least number of transistors, making its chips popular in industrial controllers, kiosks, and small-load servers, says Dean McCarron, an analyst at Mercury Research. Its processor packages are a half to a quarter the size of AMD's or Intel's, McCarron says. "Initially it wasn't that big of a deal, but then the market started making noise about 'performance per watt'" and saving energy, he says.

VIA's portfolio is peppered with desktop and mobile processors that run as fast as 2.0 GHz and use 12 watts on average. A comparable Intel 2.6-GHz Celeron-D uses 84 watts, and AMD's Sempron 2800+ 2.0-GHz processor uses 25 watts. Like their larger x86 cousins, VIA's chips have 64-bit processing capabilities and are Windows Vista certified.