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New VIA x86 CPU Takes Aim At Intel Silverthorne

Posted by kdawson on from the chipping-away-at-the-prophet-margin dept.

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 While past architectures have been considerably out-of-date in terms of modern features, the new Isaiah architecture looks to be very competitive with what AMD and Intel have lined up for future ultra-mobile products.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."

4 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Sorry, brother. by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    "The current C7 processor is a sub 20 watt product.."

    Then if I read right they go on to say Isaiah will be similar. Sorry, but that's not even in the same league as Silverthorn. Silverthorn will be more like a sub 5 watt product. If this is right, they'll be competing against Core 2 processors and performance won't even be close.

    1. Re:Sorry, brother. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      As someone who has worked on Silverthorne for the past couple of years, you will be very pleasantly surprised as to how fast and how low power it will be. If you are expecting 1GHz and 20Watts, you are in for a huge surprise. You are in for an even larger surprise to see the idle power. There were many Silverthorne based mobile internet devices showcased at CES, and those developers can testify to the power and performance that they are seeing with actual silicon. Cheers!

  2. I've got a C7 running a home email server. by Vellmont · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While the performance is pretty slow (Maybe 800 mhz PIII range), it's low power and low heat, which was what I desired. Email doesn't require much processing power, so why waste the electricity on a high performance machine?

    If they make a higher performance chip that get within the range of a Core 2, I'd consider buying one to replace my higher performance server in a few years. I hate paying for more electricity, and then paying to get rid of the waste heat. I'd even consider it for a workstation PC if the performance is good enough. Quiet fans are desirable to me, super-duper performance matters fairly little.

    --
    AccountKiller
  3. More like Core 2 by ravyne · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actually, the new Via architecture shares a lot more in common with the Core 2 -- Its out-of-order, spends a lot of die space on speculation, has a fairly wide execution pipe, has something similar to the Intel's uOp-fusion and much more cache than the old C7. Its also prepped to go dual-core, but the company says that'll probably only happen once they go to 45nm. This has basically nothing in common with Silverthorn, which goes back to in-order, narrow execution pipe and smaller caches in the interest of saving die-space and power envelope. Of course, Via's chip is still focused on low-power, so it doesn't scale past 2ghz (at least at 65nm, they say) but its probably comparable to Core 2 on a clock-for-clock, core-for-core basis, give or take 20% or so.

    The Summary kind of has it backwards, Via's new chip competes more closely with Core 2, while Intel's Silverthorn competes more closely with Via's C7 chips.