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."

Comments

Makes for a great jukebox

[microbob]

I used the 800mhz Eden to put together a great Jukebox. The digital coax out to my receiver works like a charm.

Having all my music on-line and ready to be played on any PC in the house is pretty nice.

Re:Makes for a great jukebox

[buffer-overflowed]

That's their target market, and boy are these things great for uses like that. 17cm x 17cm footprint and decent media performance.

IIRC a lot of "next-gen" DVD players will be using these mainboards, and they've started putting things like hardware mpeg decoding/etc. into them. They're ideal for digital jukebox/emulator/dvd player/pvr combo systems.

Re:Benchmarks suxs

[Organic_Info]

errr beause the two are completly different uses.

The mini-itx stuff is all about power consumption or lack thereof and low noise solutions.

Why do you think I don't compare my shitty little commuter car to a bloody ferrari.

Very insightful first post.

Re:Benchmarks suxs

[Organic_Info]

I didn't say it wouldn't be useful in fact for the most part it won't. I'm making a pretty good guess here that the a P4 would cream the Nehemiah M10000 at all the usual benchmarks. My point is you would benchmark against processors in a similar/related class Durons, Celerons, Nat Semi Geodes (if they are still around), etc. There is little point in comparing a truck to a car when asking which will transport more cargo or which is more cost effective for the job. You may however compare a van with a truck both are used for more similar tasks.

Re:Why Via names stuff after Christian Mythology

[be-fan]

Why not talk about Christian mythology? We talk about Greek mythology, and Egyptian mythology, and to somebody who does not believe in Christianity, the Christian stories and traditions are no different. Mythology, in the objective sense, refers to the traditions and stories of a culture. In order to make the move from using the word mythology to using a term like "religious history" you have to first believe that the stories in question are true, which is not the case in the objective case.

Re:Why Via names stuff after Christian Mythology

[Anonymous Coward]

even God can forgive

Are you suggesting that someone else is more capable?

Re:Why Via names stuff after Christian Mythology

[jorlando]

The greeks, egyptians, sumerians and all other people of the world believed, in their time, that their gods were real and their rulers. These civilizations passed and now we call their beliefs myth. Why can't someone call the stories in Bible as myths, if they suppose that these stories aren't backed by real/historical/archeological facts? People have different views from the world, and these views should be respected. The world that we live today is a proof that intolerance isn't the best path.

Re:RNG, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I get the feeling that "random electrical noise" is anything but?

Because you don't know much about semiconductors?

Analog noise generators simply amplify the noise from a lowly diode. It is an old trick.

Discussing Literature Correctly

[billstewart]

The term "Myth" implies a literary structure, as well as often being a comment about whether you believe in something. While literature doesn't have the same level of precision in its language as programming, the terms really do have meaning, and if you want to convey information it's worth using them correctly. Greek stories about Zeus the God are myths; Greek stories about Socrates the philosopher or Pericles the politician or Thucydides and Herodotus the historians of the Pelopennesian Wars are history (though the quality of those histories is variable); Aristophanes's play "The Frogs" is entertainment drawing on mythological sources mixed with contemporary political commentary. Homer - well, you can argue how much of that was meant to be myth as opposed to entertainment fiction.

• Referring to the earlier parts of Genesis as "myth" is appropriate - stories about how the creation happened, where man came from and how we got into this sorry position we find ourselves in, etc. Many of us believe these stories to be true, in various ways, but they're not the same kinds of literature that history is. (They're also not the books that Via is naming chips after - "Genesis" would be the Intel 4004...)
• Many of the books are historical, particularly the ones these chips were named after. They're not structured as myth, and they're not teaching moral lessons or philosophical in the ways that myths do, though you can often learn those things from them. So-and-so was the king, and his sons were Joe and Fred, and they went out and invaded this territory and killed the people there and attacked that city and got killed, and his brother took over and was an even worse king and then the Babylonians invaded... Most of that's unarguably objective, though there are bits of commentary about how God helped the Israelites the times they won, and how the kings who lost lost because they were idol-worshippers and God was judging them. But even if you don't believe that God spoke to the priests, there's usually no reason to believe that the priests didn't speak to the politicians; it certainly happens today.
• The Psalms aren't myth or history - they're devotional poetry. They're really much more about the emotional life of the various authors.
• The Proverbs aren't myths - they're moral teachings.
• The various books of the Prophets are mostly not mythology either - most of them have some combination of history (who the prophet was and what was going on around him and what king he told off, since that was usually what prophets did) and mystical literature (what the prophet saw), though some of the events like Daniel in the Lions' Den can be discussed as mythical.

Also, terms like "Christianity" and "Judaism" have meaning, and while Christians believe in the Biblical books used by the Jews, they're Jewish books, and we're the latecomers here.