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VIA's New Nehemiah M10000 Processor Reviewed
Joseph Wharton writes "Mini-ITX.com has a review of VIA's new Nehemiah M10000 EPIA-M motherboard and processor. Some of the new features include a full-speed floating-point unit (finally!), SSE instructions, 64KB of full-speed L2 cache, and (get this) a hardware-based random number generator. Also, there's IO/APIC support in these new procs, potentially paving the way for dual EPIA boards."
I threw it in a case like this:
m =2729698897&category=3669
-> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
I got 2 cases for $25 (including shipping), got a 80gig HD, wireless adapter and IR keyboard.
The s-video out leave a little be desired, but it is probably my TV.
M.B.
It's almost dead but here is the page about the CPU.. interesting. hehe
"Nehemiah is the next generation C3 CPU, and features a number of improvements over the Ezra-T C3 used in all previous EPIAs. It has The 20.5 million transistors, and uses a 0.13 micron process. For comparison, a Barton Athlon or Northwood Pentium 4 have about 55 million transistors, and recent GPUs have over 100 million transistors.
The Nehemiah is designed to work at clock speeds of 1GHz and beyond - the Ezra-T is designed at up to about 1GHz.
Nehemiah has a die size of 52mm2 - the world's smallest x86 processor. It has been designed to minimize power consumption and optimise heat dissipation - VIA call this "Coolstream". Some active cooling is still required, but not very much. Let's hope for a Nehemiah Eden C3 version.
The Nehemiah features SSE instructions instead of the 3DNow! instructions featured on previous C3s. This should bring enhanced performance in 3D applications, which are optimised for more modern SIMD instruction sets. SSE optimised image processing applications should also benefit.
Full Speed FPU - the Nehemiah has a full speed floating point unit for the first time. The Ezra-T has a half-speed FPU. Floating point calculations are used heavily in 3D rendering, multimedia, and streaming applications.
Enhanced 64KB Full-Speed Exclusive L2 cache with 16-way associativity. An exclusive L2 cache gives a larger effective total cache size as it doesn't replicate the contents of the L1 cache. The more cache available, the more chance there is that program loops can run in cache and not comparatively slow main memory.
StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction - Looks ahead and gathers the data needed to optimally run applications
A hardware based random number generator (RNG) has been added. This creates true random numbers from the random electrical noise on the chip. This is of much use in security applications, allowing a strong cryptographic key to be generated. VIA call this the "PadLock Data Encryption Engine".
Future Nehemiahs will feature IO/APIC support. An Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) provides multi-processor interrupt management - dual processor EPIA anyone?
The Nehemiah is available in EBGA or Socket 370 packages - both are low profile and require less board real estate."
I forgot, don't expect one of these to run Doom 3 or UT2003. They will run office, and they will play DVDs. The earlier ones required no active cooling, it's still an extremely low power chip however.
I found the M10000 for $182 at directron, and here's what you get for your money:
VIA C3 1GHz processor
10/100 Ethernet
Firewire
TV-OUT (S-video, RCA(PAL and NTSC))
6 Channel Audio
Not a bad deal, methinks. Probably can be found cheaper, but I didn't want to look too hard.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
A hardware random-number generator is useful for crypto. If you've ever tried porting something like OpenSSH to a platform that didn't have decent RNG support (i.e. no /dev/random or /dev/urandom like Linux has), you'll have run into the fun and games of trying to come up with a decent random source.
:-)
Hardware support for RNG is a "Good Thing(TM)", and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the "Trusted Computing Platform" or whatever the DRM flavour of the day happens to be !
Cache is only useful when you're working on a small data set. Multimedia applications tend to constantly move through a large data set, which makes the cache all but useless. Full details here.
What's this Submit thingy do?
This review links to a method that sounds ridiculously simple to overclock the Epia M processors using nothing but a software utility, but it's a Windows utility.
:)
Is there a Linux program with equivalent functionality? It would be nice to bump my M9000 ("borderline" in several of the listed benchmark results) to a full gigahertz and into the (acceptable) green level instead of yellow
The ceo of Via, Wen-chi Chen, is a Fundlementist Christian, so as a result this is the name source for many of their products (joshua, sameul, nehemiah).
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Dual processor boards have already been announced - it's been eagerly awaited in the MythTV camp, as it should allow dual-tuner support. And since it's low power, you won't need a Zalman/Thermalright heat sink and a specialty fan to make it quiet.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
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...
Have an EPIA 800MHz, works great for MP3s but bought it for a media center. Not enough "nuts" for decoding MP2 video in real time. The fullspeed FPU on the 10000 would certainly help in that department. Bogos show up as 1200 but that's only for 1+1 stuff, not 1+1.1. The best part of these little boards is they're dead quiet and generate miniscule amounts of heat. For that reason alone, I'm looking into the 10000 as a replacement for my current EPIA.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Nehemiah and Ezra are prophets of the old testament of the bible.
They both have a book named after them.
The CEO of VIA is a fundamentalist christian and that is why he uses biblical names.
So he's not Jewish, but are bible consists of the Jewish holy books and the new testament.
And you gotta admit those Jewish names sound much more exotic then "James" or "John" (Though if we didn't translate those names they would be in Jewish "Ya'akov" and "Jochanan" respectively, which also sounds cool).
Anyone considering a M10000 should read this first. Basically, VIA released two separate boards under the M10000 name. The second of which is the only one to feature the Nehemiah core. The first series (the one from directron.com) still uses the older Ezra-T core. Right now, there's not many vendors who can reliably provide Nehemiah processors. The only places I've seen are idot.com and monarchcomputer.com.
Notable features:
That this comment, although funny, is from someone who has never used the Epia 10000
HenryJamesFeltus.com
I think it is a great thing that a company has started to make low power cpus. Imagine all those P4 and AMD cpus out there that waits for Word to tell them to do something. You dont need 3ghz for that. A modern P4 or AMD processor uses about 70W of energy for nothing.
:)
Hey if you could reduce that to 35W you are not only geting 35W less for the cpu you are also lowering the power consumtion on the air condition. An office building that starts to take the power consumtion serius could save lots of cash on electrical bill and probably some on the environment to
I have been using it for a couple weeks (actually the Ezra and not Nehemiah version). SuSe Linux 8.1 Pro 256MB Ram 80GB HD It runs quiet and I have been very surprised how much I like it. This is a very nice board, very quiet and unobtrusive, extremely reasonably priced. I use it to do family geneology stuff at relatives houses (old people love it cause it is small, quiet, and appears like a DVD player hooked to a flat screen (15"LCD) TV. Also, is a very nice MP3 player. If I need a powerful computer, I still have my Wind Tunnel to fire up... I would probably recomend this more than any computer I ever bought for an ordinary computer user. ( Heck, Linux people can always put a Wind Tunnel in the closet, hook it to LAN, and have power and quiet.)
HenryJamesFeltus.com
You're thinking of 640KB.
My 'main machine' (this one) is a C3/866 with lots of DDR memory, I built it back at the start of last year. It takes very serious load to make it feel slow, and it dissipates very little heat. I think you could get away with passive cooling with an 800, but not with mine.
I suppose something running at that speed was state-of-the-art back around 2001. I have no need or plans to upgrade for at least a year, maybe longer.
obvious disclaimer - I do not game.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
I thought at first you were joking, but found a couple of links from back in 2001 where the Esther appeared in their roadmap beyond the Nehemiah. Nehemiah was then planned for Q4 of 2001, and Esther H2 of 2002.
Reminds me a bit of the slippage with the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Hmm must be new here =P. After a certain amount of characters slashdot will insert a space. This was to stop those posts where there was just a long line of letters that made it so you had to horizontally scroll for miles and generally messed up the page.