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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."
Wasn't sure about Nehemiah, so googled and found this:
Book of Nehemiah:
This book continues the history of the children of the captivity, the Jews lately returned out of Babylon. We have a full account of Nehemiah's labours for them, in these his commentaries: wherein he records not only the works of his hands, but the very workings of his heart, inserting many devout reflections and ejaculations, which are peculiar to his writing. Twelve years he was the tirshatha, or governor of Judea, under the same Artaxerxes that gave Ezra his commission. This book relates his concern for Jerusalem and commission to go thither, chap. 1, 2. His building the wall of Jerusalem, notwithstanding much opposition, chap. 3, 4. His redressing the grievances of the people, chap. 5. His finishing the wall, chap. 6. The account he took of the people, chap. 7. His calling the people to read the law, fast and pray, and renew their covenant, chap. 8 - 10. He peoples Jerusalem and settles the tribe of Levi, chap. 11, 12. He reforms divers abuses, chap. 13. This was the last historical book that was written, as Malachi, the last prophetical book of the old testament.
The new CPU sounds cool, one question, with the 'random number generator' is this supposed to be paving the way for Via and 'Secure Computing'?
*sighs* Oh well, I could use a new media b0x3n.
The write-up is misleading...
The 64k is the L2 cache which is 16-way set-associative, full-speed and exclusive i.e. it doesn't overlap with the contents of the L1 cache. The L1 cache is 128k unless they've changed it (none of the immediately available info mentions the size, but that's what the current C3 has).
So, actually the chip has 192K of cache, configured pretty much the same as it was in the AMD Duron (128k L1, 64k L2, exclusive). Considering the target marketplace and performance of the chip, this seems to be plenty.
Maximum power consumption of 15-20 watts? The review also indicates that Nehemiah requires active cooling as well. A P3 based Celeron is also inexpensive, can be installed in a Shuttle SFF box, is much faster, and only consumes a few more watts. I think a Celeron based system would be a much better value.
imagine, when boards are self contained on one microchip, the name will be the "ultra gigaplexor 90000000 duplex teranaxor"
Perhaps they need somebody to end the madness? (One of) the first electronic computers was called ENIAC. Then came the UNIVAC and the ILLIAC, etc. So somebody called their computer MANIAC, and ended that tradition.
I like to think of Windows 98 as being derived from the MANIAC, while Windows XP is made BY maniacs.
Serioulsy though, I think microcontrollers is a kind of fusion of CPU/RAM/ROM other circuits, and they usually have shorter names than desktop CPUs have, IIRC.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Yep, I was considering an ITX machine but decided on a Tualeron+micro atx motherboard. Bigger, yes, but much more powerful, and perhaps a tad cheaper depending on what models you're looking at and whatnot.
anyone know if the optional lvds connector they mention in the review could somehow be used with a dvi-d equipped display?
Yeah... it's not quite as low-power as the Eden platform is or the 800Mhz C3 processors. Most of the higher-end Ezra-T and now the Nehemiah require active cooling, so it can't be used too much as a quiet computing platform (though there is the neat slimcase that uses it's side fins as the processor's heatsink and is quiet).
A Celeron, mostly the Tualatin-based ones, would be a better option and provide some additional expansion slots. You can even underclock the Celeron if you really wanted to keep it running cool as well, and maybe use a really nice heatsink to keep it somewhat cool.
"StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction - Looks ahead and gathers the data needed to optimally run applications"
Finally! A WinChip that doesn't insist on doing things the old-fashioned way.
Three years go when VIA merged the Cyrix product name with the Winchip line, they touted the WinChip's lack of Out-Of-Order-Execution and use of Static Branch Prediciton as "features".
This was puported to save power and make the die smaller. Funny to see them do a complete 360 only 3 years later, after their castrated chip has failed to attract a single Tier 1 vendor.
The Cyrix MII sold better than the WinChip / VIA C3; at least Compaq and Emachines were selling systems based on it back in the day. It sold where the WinChip couldn't, because it actually delivered on being both reasonably powerful and dirt-cheap. The WinChip could claim to be dirt-cheap, but reasonably powerful...welll...
So, after so long a wait, do we finally have a winner? A low power chip that can actually play a Divx movie? Perhaps they could get rid of that hardware DVD decoder too, a feature other systems havn't needed since the Celeron 400 / K6-2 450.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
The Atari 800 had one in 1978. And Commodore 64 programmers were used to using some values from the sound hardware for the same purpose. It's funny how some ideas go away for a long time, only to resurface after most people have forgotten it.
Can anybody with a clue comment on whether this latest relase would be able to run fanless (e.g. using a hustechnologies.net case), and would the linux/XFree drivers be able to support widescreen resolutions (the review at mini-itx.com says only traditional resolutions are supported, but this might be different in the linux/XFree world)?
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.
:)
I don't know that these little boxes are quite powerful enough at this point to be ready for PVR applications. This is especially true if you're talking about encoding (recording a show) and decoding (watching a show) at the same time. Tom's
had a nice little VIA ITX test a little while ago and the Via processors got drilled when trying to display MPEG-* and DivX movies even in medium resolutions. Obviously the hardware decoders and other improvements VIA has made should help out a good bit on the scores. Perhaps it will be possible now to run MythTV and view recorded shows on this box and offload recording duties to another box on the network. It will be really interesting to see what these new little boards can do. I'll pick one up once they're able encode and decode at the same time at high resolutions. I'll probably be waiting a while but that's ok.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
The Book of Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah were originaly one book. From a historical perspective, they are important in that they provide information about a critical period in the middle east. The events chronicaled have reprocusions for the next 5 centuries, until the destruction of the Temple in 70AD. The culture of the post-exilic Nation of Isreal, was fundimental different from that of any period befor captivity. The last half of the narative ( Nehemiah) explains why these changes happened. And most importantly, documents the change in the World View of the Hebrew people, that underpinned their new culture.
These Books are also very well written from a liturary point of view. The style is clean and accesible, even in translation. The narrative is well paced, with plenty of action to prevent it from bogging down. There is also some subtle humor throughout. The story itself is engrosing with a lot of human drama.
Christians should read this book ( along with the rest of the Bible). It illustrates some important spitual concepts. Learning these concepts will help a Christian to get past the first rest stop on their walk with Jesus. Reading Nehemiah will also benifit non-Christian people of Faith, anyone with an interest in Spiritual matters.
One does not need to be a Jew or a Christian to get a lot out of these books. They are well worth the effort from a liturary or historic perspective. That they also are powerfull in guiding the Spiritual walk of those of Faith, is an added bonus.
What does 1GHz mean in this context? Based on their run of Sandra's benches, the "1GHz" chip has integer performance on par with a Celeron 600 and FP performance half that of the Celery. The VIA gets smoked by the same Intel chip on the SiSoft multimedia benches. The only place the new EPIA board surpasses my flexATX celeron-600/i810 system is in the memory bandwidth test, which is expected from a DDR system.
1 ghz means nothing except to other EPIAs, and even there, not really comparable, as the review showed this 1 ghz blew away the older 1 ghz model. You have to look at the real world performance for what you are doing. The EPIAs will get rocked by a PIII800, despite being 200mhz faster by clock cycle.
I have 2 of these boards. They are pretty sweet imnsho, but you have to have a *use* for them. For myself, I am building a firewall machine and a voice/data/faq server. Both I want to use in an office environment with a fair amount of (asinine) customization (for fun). Some people will find my purposes ridiculous, given you can buy a good fax server software for less than $40 or a all-in-one machine for less than $150 these days. Same with a firewall for an office. But that's what I'm into.
Others have been looking at these for PVRs and the like. They effectively fit the bill.
btw, you can remove the fans on some of these and install a heat pipe and use other passive cooling mechansisms. The hushpc, I believe, uses the 9000 model (933 mhz) without the fan and instead with a heatpipe.
No way you're going to run the latest and greatest games, but you can run a fair number of great games with a high end PCI vid card. Hell, there's no AGP. This is not the latest tech. No PCI 66 or 64 bit in any current models, and no rumors of it coming (although that, over the AGP, would be the smartest upgrade--64bit/66 plus custom riser cards and you could really rock with quad gigabit cards).
I would have loved to have one of these in college, w/o the fan driving me nuts at 5am crashing on a final paper.
btw, I have both out-of-the-box fanless models (5000 and ME6000).