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 While past architectures have been considerably out-of-date in terms of modern features, the new Isaiah architecture looks to be very competitive with what AMD and Intel have lined up for future ultra-mobile products.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

Follow The Trend

[dsginter]

The next big step in integration is integrated memory. Cache memories are consuming most of the die in your typical high-performance CPU, these days. If you can find a CMOS-compatible, high-density (e.g. - SRAM's six transistors per cell is toooo big) memory technology, then we're going to be at the point where we can simply replace the cache memory with on-board memory. If said on-chip memory technology is nonvolatile, then we're talking panacea cakes, batman.

Naturally, this will first occur in low-performance devices where huge amounts of memory are not necessary. Then, it will work its way into the PC and up from there.

This is why Intel is divesting itself of discrete memory technologies - they don't want to be holding the bag when they're obsoleted by on-chip memory.

SPU manufacturers had better be ready for this because discrete CPUs will be going the way of the horse and buggy if anyone can ever do such a thing.

Re:Follow The Trend

[Waffle Iron]

The CPU is way faster than RAM.Replacing the cache (which is large physically compared to RAM) with normal DRAM would be a disaster for performance.

That doesn't necessarily matter if the DRAM were freed of external pin packaging constraints. For example, imagine if the CPU had an SRAM L1 cache, no L2 cache and on-chip DRAM main memory. With DRAM, you can internally access an entire row at one time. Using row-wide access, you could fill entire virtual memory pages into the L1 cache in a single RAM cycle.

Getting the most out of such a setup might require changes to the way the memory and cache have been managed for the last 20 years, but the total potential bandwith available from on-chip DRAM could be staggering.

"out of date"?

[SuperBanana]

While past architectures have been considerably out-of-date in terms of modern features

They may not be bleeding edge, but their Eden processors used to compare very favorably to Intel's low-power chips, and have unique features like Padlock accelerated encryption (which is supported at least partially by the Linux kernel to accelerate cryptographic stuff.) Padlock made it possible to have a very low power VPN server..

The only real problem I've had with the VIA processors has been availability, pricing, and cheesy 3rd party motherboards. Mini itx dot com for example wants to bend you over backwards for some pretty old systems; the latest stuff you practically need to take out a mortgage from. You can't really buy the boards from but a handful of places. VIA also seems to be ignoring the networking market (if they sold a low-power board with 3 gigabit ports, they'd put Soekris out of its misery once and for all- overnight.)

Same thing with AMD's low-power Geode (which is plug-compatible with certain athlons.) You can't buy them anywhere except bundled with really shitty motherboards.

Competition is good

[fallen1]

I used VIA (and Cyrix) back in the days of Socket 7 and they worked reliably and well for me. I have not used VIA in any new configurations, primarily because I've been rooting for AMD and a long-time supporter of their CPUs. All that aside, I want to see VIA succeed and succeed admirably. Why? Because competition for Intel (and yes, AMD too) will only benefit the consumer in the long run. If the VIA processors force AMD and Intel to rethink their designs and then _innovate_ to keep up with (or keep ahead of) VIA then the consumers win, win, and win.

What could we get out of this? Loads, of course. One thing I'm not worried about is speed of the chips. Yes, faster CPUs are generally a good thing but I'd like to see more efficient chips coming out in all areas from the chip makers. I'd like to see less heat, less power usage under load, less standby power usage, reduced need for fans/cooling, and more along the lines of efficiency. More efficient chips, especially power usage, equates to less money I spend on utility bills or batteries or whatever. More money in my pockets, more efficient chips, more competition among the chip makers - big and small - all equals "the goodness".

My $.02 for the day...

Re:Competition is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with all your remarks. This is definitely the direction things are going, and one that I think many industry observers miss amidst all the hype on power and speed. As a long time VIA supporter I am moving to my third generation of upgrades, from mini-itx to nano-itx and next to pico-itx where I will have a Gnome desktop running on something not much larger than my cellphone.

1) It's completely silent. Even my brothers laptop makes more noise.

2) VIA CPUs are astonishingly fast and capable, it's amazing what you can run in 800MHz if you drop the bloatware.

3) I could run the machine from a 5W solar panel. The power guzzler is now the display at 30W but next year we will see "optical paper displays"

4) Server farms are starting to experiment with these to reduce energy costs. As an alternative to virtualisation you can get a many hundreds of web servers, each the size of a sandwitch, in a 19 inch rack. Then you can run them as a giant cluster if you like. Replacing a CPU is as simple as hot-plugging a tiny module, very Star Trek or HAL 2001.

If they can just get the costs down. Which they will if people buy these things. So people, support VIA and think about having a "green" computer for your next machine. The days of liquid cooled mega-towers are numbered.

Re:Troll. Was Re:Follow The Trend

[morgan_greywolf]

You, and whoever last moderated the grand parent's post, aren't getting what he's saying.

What he means is: forget on-chip cache -- on-chip main memory. IOW, instead of having main memory on the motherboard, it would be embedded into your processor, running, presumable, at the same speed as the CPU.

If you follow the trends happening in CPUs, including this one, faster CPUs aren't the big issue. The real issue is the bus. The bus is slow. The more you put on the other side of it, the better. A CPU like this new VIA CPU might be slow, but if you had sufficient memory integrated right on the CPU die, it would blow the pants off your latest 4+GHz Core 2 Duo.

Overengineered against the Silverthorn

[Calyth]

The curious thing is that the Isaiah is heading towards OoO, whereas Intel's going to build the first in-order chip since the Pentium in Silverthorn.

C7 already has a good track-record for small form factor, low power, and providing acceptable performance at that category. IMO with the OoO they're heading more towards the laptop market, and I think they could've done something at least less conventional with the design.

Imagine that they modified the C7-M in-order execution core to a 4-way, fine grain interleaved multithreading, and have 2 cores. The existing C7-M has a short pipe, so pipeflushes aren't as penalizing. At the clockspeed that they're starting at (2GHz), each thread would have acceptable performance for your typical workload. And as OSes are becoming more thread happy (OSX is definitely one of them), such design would be at least something different than ordinary. It would be like having a cut down Sun Niagara in your laptop.

The current design would make it work decently well for low end laptop and desktops, but I can't help but think that the core now has a bunch of stuff that they can't exactly turn off - I haven't heard of a CPU that could switch off its OoO and retire queue, and the die size has increased significantly compared to the C7.

Re:Overengineered against the Silverthorn

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with you until you said this: And as OSes are becoming more thread happy (OSX is definitely one of them)

OS X is probably the worst modern OS when it comes to threads. Windows and Linux are an order of magnitude more efficient and scalable when it comes to running heavily multi-threaded applications. Apple is working on the problem, but they are at least 5 years behind and not making a lot of headway.

Open Video Drivers

[Doc Ruby]

These VIA CPUs and their motherboards would do a lot more good if their nVidia drivers were completely open. Quite a lot of the overall processing power is in the nVidia chip on the mobo. But when the drivers for Linux (and probably Windows, too) don't fully expose all the video features, the CPU has to do a lot more work preprocessing, at much lower efficiency than the nVidia chip can.

Re:Troll. Was Re:Follow The Trend

[volsung]

Agreed. Hopefully we'll see more of technologies like Z-RAM, which sounds like it has great promise. You get the speed of SRAM, but with only one transistor per bit, and greater density than DRAM. That should lower the power consumption significantly for current cache sizes, or allow much larger caches.

Re:Open Video Drivers - ya, they suck

[Mike McTernan]

You're right. But the poster has as point. The Unichrome support is really bad on Linux. There are about 3 different drivers to try, all with differing results:

- The OpenChrome drivers, open source, some hw-accel support
- Unichrome drivers, open source but taking a purist approach that lacks features
- Via's own drivers, limited binaries for only certain distros, nightmare compile process, but most features supported

Unfortunately for me, I bought a VIA-epia ex1000 mini-ITX. It has some nice TV out connectors (component out!), so needs a driver that knows how to get this going. Having wasted a lot of time trying to build the drivers for FC7, I gave up and ended up using the Via binaries with FC5. The problem then is that other bits of hardware aren't detected under FC5, leaving me to patch PCI tables and rebuild the kernel to get the right southbridge driver (made a big difference to system performance - much smoother) and the SMBUS working.

Looking at forums I'm definitely not alone. This guy ended up with XP: http://cg-note.blogspot.com/2007/09/via-epia-ex1000-installation-adventure.html

Personally I think the problem is with Via. They claim to support open source, but throwing out the odd binary driver and giving mangled sources with not too easy to follow build instructions isn't much more than lip service. If they were serious, they could setup a yum repository for Fedora and make rpm's and debs for each major release of the distros they choose to support. Putting all the download packages on one page of their site would also help, as would openly releasing all their datasheets.

I hope they learn to do better, because I feel their products are held back by the poor Linux support :(

Mike