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."

Comments

Re:Cue Apple's lawyers

[OrangeTide]

I suspect that Isaiah was renamed Nano in response to Intel's Atom. Small 4 letter names for small cpus. (I guess). Although Isaiah was likely always intended as a non-marketing codeword, I believe someone at VIA even mentioned that before.

Really...

[cartman]

From the article summary:

[Nano] 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!

Intel's chip has a power draw of less than 2.5 watts for the highest-clocked chip. I don't see how a power draw that's twice that amount would bring Intel's atom to its knees.

Also, I don't understand this necessity for cheesy bad-action-flick terminology ("Intel's chip brought to it's knees!") when all that has happened is a bit player releasing a product with no performance figures.

Re:Really...

[LarsG]

The Atom is geared towards cell phones, smartphones, and PDAs. You kid, right? Atom is not for cell phones. At idle the Atom draws 15-20 times more electricity than what you want on a phone.

Not to mention that Atom is a CPU only, you have to add a north/southbridge to get something comparable to a current ARM cell-phone SOC. To give an example - the TI Omap2420 contains everything plus the kitchen sink -accelerated 2d/3d, 3G stuff, SD-card controller, USB interface, IRDA interface, memory controller, display controller (including TV-out)...

Currently, the Atom doesn't make much sense except on devices where X86 compatibility is a plus. In other words, subnotebooks.

Re:Really...

[Wdomburg]

Trying to compare the two processors with the amount of information available on them right now is pretty silly in general. Clock speed comparisons are even more silly considering the vastly different architectures (single-issue, in-order vs three-issue, out-of-order) and cache sizes (24K L1-I, 32K L1-D, 512K 8-way L2 vs 64k L1-I, 64K L1-D, 1024K 16-way L2).

Power comparisons are a bit premature at this point as well. Noone knows what typical consumption is at this point; just idle and max. A lot depends on how effective the power management is in each processor. Depending on the performance delta between the chips it's also possible that a higher maximum TDP won't always be the disadvantage it seems to be; if the Via chip has higher instruction throughput, it means it can return to idle state that much quicker.

There's also the question of the whole platform, as well. The chipset from Intel manages an impressive TDP (about 2.3W) but is somewhat limited - only 400/533MHz FSB, low max resolution (1366x768 LVDS or 1280x1024 SDVO), one DDR2 400/533Mhz slot, only two 1x PCI-e ports, no SATA and only one PATA channel. So far as I know there are no hard numbers of graphics performance since they're integrating a licensed design (PowerVR SGX535) that has traditionally been used in embedded devices. However their own slideshows comparing the capabilities with their (over four year old!) 915G chipset show about half the memory bandwidth and less than a third the pixel rate. In other words, pretty piss poor. They do, however, include hardware acceleration for most common codecs, which should minimize the impact in their target market.

The new chipset Via is offering - the VX800 - consumes far more power at peak (though as with the processor this may or may not reflect typical depending on how the power management is implemented) but is a bit more featureful - 800MHz bus, up to 1920x1200, two DDR2 667MHz slots, a 4x PCI-e slot in addition to the two 1x slots, two SATA 2.0 ports and video capture support. They also offer a lower power version - the VX800u - which drops the peak TDP to 3.5W but drops the bus to 400MHz and nixes the 4x PCI-e slot and SATA ports.

My take is that the Intel offering is probably better suited to certain embedded applications as well as the MID market. The main market these two will likely compete in is the burgeoning UMPC market. Without real performance and power numbers it's hard to say who has the edge. More likely than not which chip is best will depend entirely on what trade-offs the manufacturer is willing to make.