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I guess this the "cooking of the frog" - slow introducing of user-friendly security features and programs with a smiling face, before delivering a DRM cucumber up consumer's asses. I'm willing to bet that their initial TCPA implementation will be under the same name of "Padlock" - there is apparently already a bunch of security-related stuff named "Padlock".
It makes me mad that they are not even doing the work... they just lifted Frankel's stuff and named it Padlock.

At least the c3 has a hardware random number generator for better encryption. Sadly you need stepping 03 of the Nehemiah core, as I discovered when I got my motherboard and got Linux compiled to use it. I had a 01 stepping so it was no-go. Felt kinda cheated.
(as well as the low-noise really isn't all that lown noise)

Checkout VIA PadLock Hardware Security Suite. Their procs have built in AES encryption as well as a very high bitrate Random Number Generator. This allows their 1GHz procs to do encryption an order of magnitude faster than a 2.4GHz P4. So this software just takes advantage of and promotes their hardware.

JOhn

Don't forget the RNG on VIA's Nehemiah CPU core. I've heard it's very fast and very random.

However, I haven't tried the program and I have no idea just what it actually does, as it is only avaiable for Windows and Redhat 9.0. I imagine that the source will be "available" to "approved" developers.

Watch the viaarena.com forums.

I don't have an Intel or AMD you insensitve clod!

He used the VIA EPIA V8000A motherboard with an Eden core CPU. From what I found on google (here), the Eden core does run the FPU at full clock speed.

I have the VIA EPIA 8000 (not sure what the V and A modifiers mean), with an Ezra core. FYI, Eden isn't a core, it's an initiative. The VIA Eden is aka VIA EPIA 5000, and was the first fanless Mini-ITX. Eden was the development product moniker, and came to refer to the motherboard that was first produced from that initiative. It can also refer to any C3 CPU made to run fanless.

Back onto the original topic; my EPIA 8000 with an Ezra core runs the FPU at half clock. This document on the differences between the Ezra/Ezra-T and Nehemiah cores indicates that one of the fundamental differences between the two is the full speed FPU. So I doubt that the article you quoted is accurate...

Just some more info... Nehemiah was manufactured at 933 MHz, 1 GHz, and speeds up to 2 GHz are planned. The Ezra was manufactured at 533 MHz and 800 MHz in its first run; the 533 is also known as the Eden. The Ezra-T (the second run of the Ezra) was made at 600 MHz (aka Eden), 800 MHz, 933 MHz, and 1 GHz.

Via's Eden-N platform - 12x12 cm mainboard - 15x15mm CPU - How's that for small! :)

Arguably though, early adopters are the only ones with PC-based 'digital convergence' systems. They are based on expensive motherboards and fast, hot chips. As a result they are either noisy, or a lot of money was spent to make them quiet. The market is waiting for a small, quiet, powerful (in relative terms) platform.
The Via Epia boards are almost there but are just a little short of processor horsepower to handle DivX decoding (and other processor intensive operations). The rumours are that there will be a 1.2Ghz Via C3 processor on a new core revision (C5P) out shortly. C3's provide roughly 50% of the horsepower of a similarly clocked P3 in the current core so at 1.2 Ghz (with some potential improvements in the new version core) you are almost at the level where you have a cool, quiet platform with enough horsepower to be a serious media-center PC.
Of course, Via are rumoured to have some very cool stuff on the horizon, included a possible dual-cpu board and a new processor codenamed 'Esther' to be produced in IBM's fab.
Maybe this is what I am waiting for? So perhaps this is the year when digital convergence becomes a reality for the masses?

Mini-ITX boards can't handle Intel CPUs. They are designed for VIAs own EDEN CPU.

If you're looking for a much lower-end solution (e.g. you're running a web server on your DSL line), makes some low-cost little boards, one of which can support laptop hard drives. No graphics, supports a variety of Linux and *BSD operating systems.

Or you can get a used laptop from eBay or a local used-computer dealer. Power use is low, size is small, operating system support is easy to figure out, and they theoretically have built-in UPSs, though used laptop batteries are often pretty dead. Prop them up for good airflow to avoid heat problems.

The article does raise an interesting point in my eyes.. Modern Processors put out too much heat!

I'm wondering when Intel and AMD will stop concentrating on speed (as at some point it may become less relevent, but not quite yet I guess) and start concentrating on lessening the heat generation.

I for one pray for the day that even passive cooling becomes enough to run a pentium....
As a side note to that, Via has managed to make processors that can be passively cooled, but they're much slower and equivalent to a P3.

I'd love to try one, but there's no way that I'd pay $1200 for one.

Maybe one could build a similar machine with one of these guys.

Of course, it is an x86. I have yet to see a low cost motherboard in any form factor that was not an x86 (or an incredibly outdated, I suppose you could get a cheap Mac 68k mobo on ebay or something.) The C3 is cheap and has amazing performance/Watt. Given its addition to the x86 landscape I guess I'm not too concerned about finding a cheaper ARM or PowerPC solution.

How about the mini ITX via boards? It's what I'm looking at to replace my current router which is an old 486 using freesco. Why am I replacing it? Mostly for disk space to be honest ...

Check out the mini ITX at http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/mini_itx.jsp

Maybe AMD is dropping the lower bit processors, but Intel sure won't as long as there is a demand for them.

The 866BASE gets a P3, 2 ethernet ports, and the usual interfaces on a 91mm x 96mm board.

Plenty of opportunities for packing a nice computer into a small case.

...in VIA bringing their Nano-ITX motherboards (12cm x 12cm) affordably to market than the likes of Oqo, Nimble and this other group.

Combine that with their new, smaller Eden-N processor that runs at 1 GHz with 7 W of heat dissipation, and built-in AES 256-bit acceleration...

Considering their Mini-ITX boards run under $200, I don't think they'll have a tough time beating $3,700.

- Supports three 184-pin DDR SDRAMs up to 2GB memory size

Why would you get a 2 GB total limit from 3 memory slots? I read that as the DIMMs being 2 GB each, which sounds like 6 GB to me.

The Asus and Shuttle boards seem a bit firmer about their memory limits, but they claim a 3 GB limit. And the Asus board uses the same chipset as the MSI - the Via K8T800, which Via says has a 4 GB memory limit - so someone's confused. I know I am.

Well, the thing is damn near every chip manufacturer releases datasheets on their chips. That includes the obvious ones like Intel, Motorola, IBM, Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor, Microchip, Samsung, Micron, etc... and those are just off the top of my head. I used to have several 3" binders full of datasheeets printed 8 pages per sheet (4 pages front, 4 pages back) per project from other companies whose products we used in our designs. These datasheets were our bibles for the design. For VIA not to release datasheets keeps them from being put in embedded designs, new designs of motherboards, etc. Below is a copy of their policy on datasheets... quite crappy I might add.

"Datasheets are typically only supplied to development partners and large customers under a non disclosure agreement. If you are an end user, please be advised that datasheets will not be supplied. Requests from Open Source Developers and individuals creating system management tools and other utilities for public use are considered on a case by case basis. Driver developers can also find links to information from Microsoft and assistance for Linux developers here. Please complete the request form below and clearly explain what information you need and why.

Thank you for your cooperation." - VIA Datasheets Request Form

Now, you might be saying big deal. All you have to do is fill out a form. Now, notice they will only pay attention to you if you are a big company. Well, in my previous life I used to be an embedded hardware developer. I helped design new circuit boards for a variety of companies. Some big some small. I guarantee you that if I saw a statement like this I would not even contact VIA. We have deadlines to meet and we don't need any of this red tape crap. Its hard enough to get a design out on an impossible deadline without resorting to begging a company to give us info for their stupid products. Most other companies are very forthright with their info and will even make sure a Field Applications Engineer is there to answer your questions. I know alot of other designers will back me up and agree that we don't need one more roadblock. Then again, I guess VIA's focus is just on the few manufacturers that use their products. In addition, I think its pretty sad that they only release their datasheets on a "case by case basis" to OSS developers. Whatever. This makes me wanna hurl my Asus Terminator (with VIA chipset) out the damn window. Now, I know why the Linux kernels are so damn finicky on this system. I was seriously considering buying a little mini-ITX board and case before I saw this, but not anymore. I can use someone else, and I will buy from someone else for personal use as well.

JOhn

Intel and AMD may have the fastest processors, but I'm much more interrested in Via's small and cool (low temperature) processors... The possibilities just seem to grow with each generation :)

The new Via Eden-N is especially interesting.

VIA chips that support "3DNow!" instructions instead of SSE instructions also run floating-point instructions at half the clock rate of the CPU.

VIA chips that support SSE instructions run floating-point instructions at the CPU clock rate. The "Nehemiah" CPU is the first of these. The Eden-N is a descendant of Nehemiah.

Here is VIA's press release on the Eden-N.

Benchmarks are the tool of the Devil, but here are a set from a review of the VIA EPIA M1000 motherboard.

Here is a review of subjective use of a 1 GHz Nehemiah.

... are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?

I guess I should have included news sources in my links, because there sure are a lot of them.

All sarcasm aside, your point is well taken. I like the article on the Sun site because it explains more about how the technology works than any of the news sites, but it seems that Slashdot editors are much more likely to accept a story if the link points to an "impartial" news source rather than a press release. Thanks for the tip.

The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more.

Actually, neither one of those products have shipped:

From Via's press release:

The VIA Eden-N processor is sampling now and is expected to start appearing in secure networking, entertainment and communication devices in Q1, 2004.

From Transmeta's press release:

... the Efficeon processor family will be competitive with, or outperform competing microprocessors operating within critical thermal limits such as the 7W limit for typical fanless notebook designs. Systems based on the processor are expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter.

From the VIA press release touting the Eden-N: "Unlike software RNGs or existing multi-chip solutions, the PadLock RNGs utilize electrical noise on the CPU to generate market-leading quantities of high quality entropy for use in the creation of security keys. The entropy is stored in a collection buffer where it can be accessed directly via a dedicated x86 instruction set without the use of vulnerable software drivers." Best new technology of 2003!

You know that not even noise diodes are secure to attacks?

Yes, as do hardware engineers. If you read the Cryptography Research analysis of the C3 Nehemiah entropy source you can see that it is well designed, using 4 free wheeling oscillators / ring oscillators at different frequencies.

This raw output is then fed into a second stage where "statistical whitening" is applied to ensure that the entropy is not just random, but nicely random.

Its a pretty interesting read: check it out!

The GA-7VAXP has the VIA VT8235 southbridge, specs at http://www.via.com.tw/en/apollo/VT8235.jsp. As you can see, USB 2.0 high-speed is supported.

I WANT one!

I'm not making a statement about the state of the world or the war on Iraq. If anything this project should be seen as positive. An canister used to hold ammunition that brought down firery destruction and death is now used creatively to create through programming and developing ideas for new embedded projects. There are some pretty cool projects out there using these Mini-ITX boards. Check out VIA technologies site for some examples.

Another embedded project called Army Linux uses the VIA technologies Mini-ITX form factor motherboard. The Army Linux project documents the development of an embedded Linux system constructed from a 50-caliber ammunition canister, which features a backlit LCD screen and a small 1U power supply. The site covers construction techniques, costs and hardware installation.

You haven't seen this then, have you? (I assume you've seen Ezra-T benchmarks - Ezra-T C3/Eden CPUs SUCK ROYALLY)

Tech-Report did a review of various RAID controllers last year.

In addition, VIA's KT600 provides Serial-ATA RAID 1 (mirroring) capability through the southbridge. There are also a large number of nforce2 boards that use Silicon Images Sil 3112A controller.

"The Antaur also ships with Via's "Padlock" feature, a random-number generator that actually produces "true" random numbers by measuring random components of the thermal energy produced by the chip, according to its designer, Glenn Henry. RNG generators can be used to develop true randomized cryptographic keys."

Check out Via's processors - x86 compatible stuff designed for low power consumption, particularly the Eden and C3.

With the workload distributed across the whole platform, rather than being concentrated on the processor, the VIA Antaur processor has to do less work, saving battery life while delivering smooth 30 frames per second DVD playback.

The title is incorrect - VIA have launched a "new" processor.

In fact it looks to me like a Nehemiah-core C3 processor with some power saving technology thrown in, aimed at the Centrino market. VIA are fond of rebadging tech until it sticks - the C3 is just a Cyrix, albeit several generations on.

Compare and Contrast...

Of course Antaur laptops aren't going to be as powerful as an Athlon or P4 luggable, but they might actually weigh less than a small cottage and cost under $1000... Is it just me, or have laptops actually got bigger over the years?

The title is incorrect - VIA have launched a "new" processor.

In fact it looks to me like a Nehemiah-core C3 processor with some power saving technology thrown in, aimed at the Centrino market. VIA are fond of rebadging tech until it sticks - the C3 is just a Cyrix, albeit several generations on.

Compare and Contrast...

Of course Antaur laptops aren't going to be as powerful as an Athlon or P4 luggable, but they might actually weigh less than a small cottage and cost under $1000... Is it just me, or have laptops actually got bigger over the years?

I love when they use stock photos with Macs in them for companies selling x86 products. It's like the group that does advertising/site design can't remember that not everyone uses Macs (or it's not important to them).

Don't get me wrong, I prefer Macs and I used to troubleshoot them for an ad agency. It was amusing when they would do ads for PCs and ask to take photos of Macs & their parts.

As far as inexpensive fanless systems go, perhaps consider the VIA Eden platform. It's definitely got the power to play back oggs and mp3s (and maybe a bit more), as well as having some nice integrated goodies (Audio, NIC, USB, etc). To top it all off, I've seen the board/CPU going for $100 USD. It may be just the thing.

...judging by the spesifications is isn't much more than one of the lower-power mini-itx motherboards from VIA and some bundled perhipals.

So why not do as the good people over at mini-itx.com and roll your own? You may not save all that much money on it, but you can get a system thats tailormade for your needs and absolutly one of a kind... or you can molest some poor old computer and pimp it out with some new, faster hardware.

You should check out the Via C3 processor. I use one of these at home in my webserver. It's a rather slow chip, but its biggest draw is that it costs less than $50us for a 1GHz chip, and draws only 10 watts. I run mine without a fan.

I wish there was consumer demand for low power destop computing.

Motorola's G3 and G4 processors are known for their low-power consumption, as well as Via's C3 line of CPUs.

• 10% drop in power consumption
• 50% drop in system noise
• Integrated MPEG-2 decoder
• ATA-133
• 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
• S-Video and RCA tv-Out
• S/PDif digital audio connection
• 1 avaliable PCI slot

before everyone starts comparing this to p4 or athlon, it's not meant to compare to them. this chip is only 1 ghz, but the selling point is it's low power consumption and it doesn't run too hot (the slower cpu's use only passive cooling). So yeah, you're not going to be playing doom 3 on it, but you can do cool things like put it in your car or have a pc that is (almost) completely silent. So for around 200 you get a mobo/cpu/video card/sound card/etc... not too bad of a deal if you ask me...

I've built a multimedia box based on one of these sweet motherboard/CPU combos. They can be run without fans (or with a small 40 mm fan) and have integrated 100 Mbps LAN, USB2, Firewire, VGA (+tv out), 6 channel sound and a hardware MPEG decoder. Add a slimline DVD/CD-RW combo and a large external harddrive (external to avoid problems with the small power supply). There is a one PCI expansion slot for the TV card.

I'm running it under Windows, but Linux drivers are available here.

Further discussion is bound to appear on sci.crypt.random-numbers before too long.
First, the best paper I've been able to find is this one;
http://www.via.com.tw/en/viac3/via_c3_padlock_ev al uation.pdf

This HRNG is based on sampling a high speed oscillator with a low speed oscillators XORed together.
The output is run through a "von Neumann
Corrector Register" before finally being output.
(The corrector can be bipassed.)
Both oscillators and Von Neumann's method of correcting for bias have a bad history in HRNG,
so this particular HRNG doesn't give me that warm glowy feeling of having been designed by someone who knew what they were doing.

The output of this generator is biased, even in the "corrected" mode.
This isn't damning by itself, but it shows that as usual,
the raw bits are not independant, so the Von Neumann corrector doesn't, and it's IMO overall a waste.
Not a big waste, it has some good properties,
but there are much better things that could have been built out of the realestate.

The interdependance of the bits is typical of an oscillator design,
and we can expect all the usual failures.
In particular, if they ever do a shrink of this chip, they need to redesign the oscillator portions.

Although I'm not particular impressed with this design, and the output needs to be processed before being used,
it's still way better than nothing.
With a raw output of over 3 megabytes a second,
what it lacks in unbiasedness can be more than made up with oversampling.
In the processed mode, it's only 1/8 the speed
so it wouldn't be an acceptable replacement for statistical programs even if the output were acceptably unbiased.
Despite the claims of the paper of .85-.99 bits of entropy per bit,
Clearly the amount of entropy in the raw mode is far less than .5, probably closer to .3.
(If it were as high as claimed, then the corrector wouldn't be as slow as it is.)
The bad entropy estimate is really a failure of the paper though, not the HRNG.
Many HRNG designs produce less than .1 e-bits/per bit so .3 isn't bad.

-- this is not a .sig

> I mean, the Pentium IV, *that's* the CPU, and VIA doesn't make those, right?

Correct, they do not make Pentium 4 processors, but they do make their own. Have you been in a cave?

To be slightly pedantic, can't anyone get the name of the company right?

It's even written on all their press releases, including the one linked to from Slashdot earlier today:
Note to reporters, editors and writers: VIA is written in ALL CAPS!

To be slightly pedantic, can't anyone get the name of the company right?

It's even written on all their press releases, including the one linked to from Slashdot earlier today:
Note to reporters, editors and writers: VIA is written in ALL CAPS!

Linux was first developed for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher). These days it also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64 and CRIS architectures.

VIA's web site says that you are testing their hardware RNG, and "preliminary results show high-quality output".

So... how does it work? I know Intel's chipsets count cycles of a high-speed (~300 MHz) clock between cycles of a low-speed VCO controlled by resistor noise.

Did they repeat Intel's mistake implementing hardware whitening, or is it feasable to implement on-like quality checks by testing to see if the deviation from randomness is as expected?

What's the software interface?

Most of these small PCs I've looked at have been >$300 (the one linked in the story doesn't list a price), and haven't been fast enough for my needs, so I looked and found a better solution: Mini-ITX.

These motherboards are only 100 dollars and a little more than 6 inches square. They have integrated video, 800MHz VIA C3 processors, ethernet, TV out, sound, and 2 IDE busses. And the fact that they use C3 processors, they only consume 10 watts, for the whole motherboard! You can get more info here:

http://mini-itx.com/
http://shop2.outpost.com/product/3349552
http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/mini_itx.jsp

Orange