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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."
The name of the processor and chipset shall be inversely porportionate to the actual size of the chipset and chip.
imagine, when boards are self contained on one microchip, the name will be the "ultra gigaplexor 90000000 duplex teranaxor"
Now I can have a complete system failure
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.
That sounds a bit small.
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.
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.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
One would hope they don't host their site on a mini-itx box :)
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
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."
Nah, that's the t-1000 you're thinking of... *har har*
...the "Better Than Ezra".
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.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
Wow. given an infinite number of these processors and an infinite amount of time, these things could write code that's identical to SCO's.
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...
I'm waiting for the 3 Ghz Jesus model to come out. Apparently it would be able "to do miracles!" I don't know about this marketing hype sometimes, you kind of have to see it to believe it.
Signing off,
Doubting Thomas
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
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
Notable features:
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.
and (get this) a hardware-based random number generator
Oh, so it comes with a pair of fuzzy dice? What about a "Type R" sticker, so it'll SEEM faster?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
That this comment, although funny, is from someone who has never used the Epia 10000
HenryJamesFeltus.com
I had no idea there were so many Jews in Hong Kong. (This is not a racial troll, I seriously have never seen a chinese Jew in my life)
I had the same question you did. One day, a friend and I went into a Chinese restaurant to have some lunch. I asked the waiter, "Do you have Chinese Jews?" He answered, "No Chinese Jews. We have apple joos, orange joos, prune joos, but no Chinese joos."
Thank you.
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
The John the Baptist chip is particularly good on headless systems.
anyone know if the optional lvds connector they mention in the review could somehow be used with a dvi-d equipped display?
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".
VIA Engineers also note that this was previously a set of registers that they just couldn't iron the crosstalk kinks out of. As such, it was rebranded a feature in classic computer tradition.
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
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
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)?
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
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.
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.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks