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VIA Introduces the Nano Processor
Vigile writes "While the VIA Isaiah architecture had been previously discussed, the new x86 processor is officially being released as the VIA Nano. The Nano marks VIA's first 64-bit, superscalar, speculative out-of-order CPU design and is being built on Fujitsu's 65nm process technology. While direct performance comparisons are still missing, the products being released could bring Intel's Atom platform to its knees: clock speeds as high as 1.8 GHz or as low as 1.0 GHz with a maximum power draw of only 5 watts! VIA's recently announced mini-note OpenBook platform is a likely candidate for the Nano the processors but they will likely find their way into mainstream desktop and notebook computers as well." Reader MojoKid contributes a link to HotHardware's story on
the chip now known as the Nano , as well as a January interview with VIA's Centaur design center president, Glenn Henry, who
"went into fairly deep detail on what VIA had in store with Isaiah."
Intel has 65nm Core Solo processors (the U1300-1500) that are spec'd at 5.5 watts TPD, and they tend to be conservative on that. Now I suppose it could end up that the Via chip does more per clock than the Core Solo, but I'd want to see some real world benchmarks before buying in to that. Via has traditionally not been that powerful per clock, and Intel's Core chips are some of the most powerful per clock of anything we've yet seen.
Also reading the article, 5 watts isn't the max, 5 watts is the TDP at 1GHz. Going up to 1.8GHz you go to 25 watts. This is very similar to the Core Solo (5.5 watts for 1-1.33Ghz, 27 watts for 1.66-1.83GHz). So it seems to me this isn't really a competitor to the Atom, more to the Core Solo. However the Core Solo is a pretty impressive chip,, so to be a real competitor this will need to be as well.
Also Intel has a 45nm factory up and running full steam, with parts available retail. Currently it's Core 2 desktop components it's making, but there's no reason that it can't do these Core Solo notebook chips as well. Of course, going to the smaller process would mean even less power usage.
So we'll have to see how this chip does in real world benchmarks once it's available to third parties. However, it isn't some new part that comes in below what Intel is offering, rather it is in the same segment as their Core Solo. That means it faces some reasonably stiff competition on the performance front.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Like the old joke "the watch is tiny but look at the battery I have to carry in a suitcase" take a look at this photo.
That's the CPU in the foreground, passively heated, oo groovy. But wait, what's that huge heatsink with the fan ?!
Intel have offloaded all the power requirements into the northbridge. That way they can say "our CPU is 2.5w matey".
Oh, and it was supposed to ship June '08 but that's been quitely cancelled so no MSI Wind for you for the near future.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I know you're joking, but ARM chips in the GHz range are drawing about 250mW, and the chips in the iPod Nano run a lot slower than this so they've got a long way to go if they want to compete in this kind of space, or even the handheld space.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1) Intel specify typical TDP. VIA's is max TDP.
2) Intel's desktop Atom (Diamondville) is 4W, not 2.5W.
3) Intel's chipsets are 4x4s in comparison to the moped-like Atom, thus power consumption is widely unbalanced. VIA have a single-chip solution, but I don't know the power consumption.
4) CPUs spend most of their time in idle - Nano uses 100mW here for all but the highest-end Nano.
5) Nano is more powerful per clock than Atom.
The noble gas is xenon, not Xeon.
The Diamondville Atoms that this will compete with use 4W though. In addition the Intel chipsets that they have been paired with so far use up to 22W! If VIA have a 10W chipset (VX800) to use with this, they will have the best overall *platform* in terms of power consumption, and performance will be good as well apparently. The TDPs appear to ramp after 1.3GHz, it must be a side effect of the Fujitsu 65nm process.
(Anonymously, since I don't want to lose the mod points I used)
You might want to check your facts better, before posting. "MICRO SIGN", unicode code point 0x00B5, 0xB5 in ISO8859-1.
Try the processor's page or the white paper. These mainly compare Nano with the C7, so you only need to find comparisons between the C7 and other processors.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Incidentally, VIA has a theme among their processors/products of having Biblical codenames for things. In addition to Isaiah, Nehemiah, Eden, Ezra, Esther, and Samuel come to mind.
My experiences with VIA are similar.
I had a VIA 533 MHz C3 based micro-itx board and I hated it. It performed about as well as a P2 at 350MHz at best. Things that I could do on my Athlon 64 3500 in 2 hours took 12-13 on the VIA system (converting downloaded AVI files to DVDs for my folks who didn't have a DVD player that could do anything but DVDs) so instead of doing 2-3 movies at night after work, I would have to leave it run overnight and hope that it didn't encounter any errors in the process. The graphics card did not really work under BSD and I'm told that the Linux support was bad too (don't use it). Their bragged about hardware accelerated crypto was also not supported by anything so it was effectively useless. I also couldn't get Windows XP to work with it (it installed but crashed all the time) so I ended up with a machine that dual-booted Win2k and FreeBSD 6.0 without X windows. I thought about building a car PC, but I ended up selling the system instead.
I don't plan on buying VIA products again
it's also part of the NanoITX form factor they've been working on for years. I think even before iPod had a Nano.
No, I'm not kidding. The Wikipedia article on Intel Atom also says that Intel Atom is for smartphones. So the Atom is only for ultra-mobile PCs? I now see that it may not be underpowered for that application after all.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Actually, Slashdot goes a lot further. Regardless of the encoding used, HTML entities should be properly handled by the browser - so when I type ☺ the browser should display a smiling face regardless of how theye characters are encoded. Since HTML entities already are written in ASCII, compatibility between Latin-1 and UTF-8 s not a problem.
Slashdot, however, actively filters out most HTML entities. I've been told this was to avoid certain site-breaking characters, but it would be easy to whitelist a whole range of characters, for example most of the BMP.
These restrictions are entirely because the Slashdot admins want them. Period.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
"While direct performance comparisons are still missing"... you can get the indirect ones for now.
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6932&Itemid=1