Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 24th Jan 2008 22:35 UTC
"VIA's newly launched processor architecture, known for the last three years by its codename, "Isaiah," will keep the company's focus on cost and power intact while taking things in a substantially different direction. In short, this year will see something truly odd happen on the low end of the x86 market: VIA and Intel will, architecturally speaking, switch places. Intel will take a giant step down the power/performance ladder with the debut of Silverthorne/Diamondville, its first in-order x86 processor design since the original Pentium, while VIA will attempt to move up into Intel's territory with its first-ever out-of-order, fully buzzword-compliant processor, codenamed Isaiah. In this brief article, I'll give an overview of Isaiah and of what VIA hopes to accomplish with this new design. Most of the high-level details of Isaiah have been known since at least 2004, when VIA began publicizing the forthcoming processor's general feature list (i.e., 64-bit support, out-of-order execution, vector processing, memory disambiguation, and others). So I'll focus here on a recap of those features and on a broader look at the market that VIA is headed into."
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Member since:
2006-01-25
We wont know until there are some real benchmarks available, but the fundamental design appears to indicate that this chip could come close to clock-for-clock parity with say a Pentium-M (hopefully at least that) or even a Core-2 Celeron (unlikely but that would be awesome).
I know alot of people look at that and say "so what?". Well VIA's Epia stuff (nano-ITX) is a _very_ nice platform for small embedded systems (firewalls, routers, etc.) A chip like this on a nano-itx board would make it possible to build _really_ small desktop machines, UMPCs, and even home theater PCs (the current C7 based stuff is just too slow for most uses). It _should_ have enough horsepower to at least do 720P decoding (1080P may be too much for it, but its certainly within the realm of possibility). A MythTV frontend using one of these would be sweet!