New VIA x86 CPU Takes Aim At Intel Silverthorne

Kaz writes "While not operating on the same scale as the two major CPU designers, VIA has been gaining traction in the world of UMPCs and thin clients with its Eden and C7 lines of processors. While past architectures have been considerably out-of-date in terms of modern features, the new Isaiah architecture looks to be very competitive with what AMD and Intel have lined up for future ultra-mobile products. It features an out-of-order, superscalar execution core, 64-bit support, virtualization, and even SSE3 — all on a 94M-transistor, 65nm process die. The initial offering will be single-core only, though VIA says that multi-core ability is already designed in. Is Isaiah going to replace your Core 2 system for gaming? No, but it might give Intel's Silverthorne a run for the money."

Comments

Re:I've got a C7 running a home email server.

[tknd]

For a while I was on a mission to build a really power efficient PC. Unfortunately when I got my AC power meter, I learned a number of disappointing things:

• Power specifications are incredibly hard to find. One good resource is actually Dell's specification sheets.
• Most of the inefficiency is in the power supply. In the past PSUs were made incredibly cheaply and even good brands were selling 70% or less efficient PSUs. When a system consumes 100 watts at the plug, that means 30 watts are wasted at the PSU. This has become a lot better with 80+ ratings, but you still have the issue where efficiency tends to drop as power consumption drops.
• The next big culprit is the video card. The best card I ever found was an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP. They still make them and the power consumption is somewhere in the low single digit watts. Other good options are probably Intel's onboard graphics chips. I think the latest intel integrated x3100 has a max draw of 9 watts (found it somewhere on dell's spec sheets).
• Another huge culprit is the motherboard. Motherboards these days come with everything. For something like a server you don't need the fancy soundcard. The fancy secondary raid chip is also probably useless. They simply don't make plain vanilla motherboards anymore. Also the chipsets (especially nVidia's chipsets) are horrible with power consumption. There are nearly no specifications available for motherboard chipset power consumption but from my experience it can be anywhere from 10 to 30 watts total.
• Laptop parts are the best. If you can build your entire server out of laptop parts, that would be ideal. Laptop parts usually have the right configurations for clocking down the CPU, not having a power hungry motherboard, and having efficient parts along with it (wireless, hard drives). For example a 2.5" laptop hard drive even while spinning will consume around 2 to 3 watts. A normal 3.5" hard drive on the other hand can suck 7 watts while spinning. I still haven't come close to beating my dell pentium M laptop in terms of power even with a Via Eden 600mhz system with nothing but a hard drive attached. The laptop would idle at 26 watts (screen off) while the Via would idle at 40watts.
• Todays CPUs (intel core, a64 single cores) are incredibly efficient. For example I was able to build a 45watt idle AMD64 single core system. The trick is you have to pick the other parts carefully. The board I have (Asus Via board, they no longer make it) allowed me to clock down the CPU to 1000mhz and lower the voltage.
• For really small server tasks, you may want to consider purchasing a wireless router and turning it into a server by using custom firmware like DD-WRT. Some wireless routers come with usb ports which will allow you to easily attach some flash memory for storage. Routers are also naturally headless so you don't have extra useless overhead from sound and video. To top it all off they come with 3 interfaces! One for the wan, another for the lan, and a wireless interface. What more could you ask for!