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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
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."
I forgot, don't expect one of these to run Doom 3 or UT2003. They will run office, and they will play DVDs. The earlier ones required no active cooling, it's still an extremely low power chip however.
I found the M10000 for $182 at directron, and here's what you get for your money:
VIA C3 1GHz processor
10/100 Ethernet
Firewire
TV-OUT (S-video, RCA(PAL and NTSC))
6 Channel Audio
Not a bad deal, methinks. Probably can be found cheaper, but I didn't want to look too hard.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
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".
Think so? I'd heard that 64 kb should be enough for everyone...
do not read this line twice.
Anyone considering a M10000 should read this first. Basically, VIA released two separate boards under the M10000 name. The second of which is the only one to feature the Nehemiah core. The first series (the one from directron.com) still uses the older Ezra-T core. Right now, there's not many vendors who can reliably provide Nehemiah processors. The only places I've seen are idot.com and monarchcomputer.com.
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.
Nehemiah was a 6th or 5th century BCE govenor of Judea during a time when Judea was under Medo-Persian rule. I would describe Joshua, Samuel, and Nehemiah as figures from Jewish history rather than Christian mythology.
Of course, in the 19th century it was popular to assert that public figures mentioned in the Bible are figments of the writers' imagination, but this view seems to be largely discredited. The names of too many of these 'fictituous characters' showed up on monuments and public records uncovered by archeologists.