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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.
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!
"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.
And the Atari 800 also had the SIO (serial-input-output) port on it too: a universal connector for all peripherals outside of joysticks. They even had a hub for the SIO port as well. Its no wonder that the engineer responsible for the SIO port now works for Intel and holds co-patents for USB, an updated idea from Atari's heyday...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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."