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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.
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."
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 !
...the "Better Than Ezra".
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!
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
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
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.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.