Report: VIA Working on a New x86 Chip
If you haven't forgotten, you probably know that VIA still has access to an x86 license. Although they haven't made many x86 processors in recent years, the company is now working on a new unit.
A report which originates from 3DCenter.org tells us that VIA is working on its Isaiah II processor, which it hopes to announce before the end of August. The processor will be a low-power unit, where it is meant to compete with the low-power bay-trail platform from Intel as well as AMD's Kabini platform. No details are available of the units' TDP, though.
The Isaiah II CPU will come with four CPU cores that will run at 2.0 GHz. On-die there will also be 2 MB of L2 cache.
Processor | AMD Athlon 5350 | Intel Atom Z3770 | VIA Isaiah II |
|---|---|---|---|
Frequency | 2.05 GHz | 1.46-2.39 GHz | 2.0 GHz |
Core Count | 4 Cores | 4 Cores | 4 Cores |
TDP | 25 watt TDP | 2 watt SDP | ? watt |
Processor Arithmetic | 22.66 GOPS | 15.1 GOPS | 20.0 GOPS |
Multimedia Processor | 4.56 Mpix/s | 25.9 Mpix/s | 50.2 Mpix/s |
Multi-Core Efficiency | 4 GB/s | 1.7 GB/s | 3.1 GB/s |
Cryptography | 1.48 GB/s | 0.4 GB/s | 1.5 GB/s |
Power Management Efficiency (ALU) | 2.88 GIPS | 2.5 GIPS | 2.9 GIPS |
Financial Analysis (high/double precision) | 3.64 kOPTS | 1.5 kOPTS | 3.0 kOPTS |
The two remaining bits of information that we are still missing pertain to the processor's TDP and price. Those aspects can mean the difference between this CPU will become a viable option for some people. It is interesting, though, to see VIA playing a role in the x86 market again.
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New competition is always a good thing.
New competition is always a good thing.
NO THANKYOU
For their CPUs, they chose to focus on a niche market years ago, and some people have bad feelings about them from that, but their units were meant for integrated solutions for special devices not general computing, and they can't help some bad computers were made with their CPUs.
Like Ian said above, if they can give that kind of performance for around 5w TDP, and scale it up to a max of 25w like AMD's high end kabini chips then they could be a very viable option for making tablets and possible phones based SoCs and laptops.
I'll give you a hint, the Kabini 5350's Multimedia performance was 47.56. Guess you missed that by more than an order of magnitude, huh? It didn't look strange to you? Didn't think to double check it? The editor that read it after didn't either? Again, you buffoons are smart enough to write about this stuff. How about talking about a joystick or something?
Also, to clarify on VIA's x86 processors, they are actually an American team known as Centaur. They bought this company from another company that owned Centaur (IDT). They have always been in the business of making low cost processors that performed 'good enough', but keeping things very simple. They got more complex, and then AMD opened the boom on them with Bobcat, and now Jaguar. They've become irrelevant. Also, they announce products for years before they finally realize they aren't going to make it. That's an exaggeration, but not much of one. Don't waste your time waiting for their announced products, especially chipsets, because the are either very late, or never come out.
One more thing to mention is, Kabini is now old hat for AMD. The numbers Tom's published, without making much mention of it, were supplied by VIA, and are comparing a processor over a year old, with one not currently available. The dolts at Tom's didn't figure it might be worth mentioning the Puma performs much better at low wattages, and it's available now. The fastest Puma outperforms the Kabini here by a good amount(mainly because of having a 'turbo' mode, while still coming in at a 15 watt TDP. Not that doubling the performance per watt would matter much, or be worth mentioning, right Tom's? At lower wattage, the performance per watt is even more exaggerated in favor of Puma, but that's not relevant to this article.
I'm more curious as to the process node they'll be using; VIA has historically trailed here and by more of a gap than AMD. In addition, there's no mention of an iGPU, integrated north/southbridges or memory support.
(apologies if this is a double-post)
I was happy for a few minutes then reality kicked back in...
*Sigh*
I'll give you a hint, the Kabini 5350's Multimedia performance was 47.56. Guess you missed that by more than an order of magnitude, huh? It didn't look strange to you? Didn't think to double check it? The editor that read it after didn't either? Again, you buffoons are smart enough to write about this stuff. How about talking about a joystick or something?
Also, to clarify on VIA's x86 processors, they are actually an American team known as Centaur. They bought this company from another company that owned Centaur (IDT). They have always been in the business of making low cost processors that performed 'good enough', but keeping things very simple. They got more complex, and then AMD opened the boom on them with Bobcat, and now Jaguar. They've become irrelevant. Also, they announce products for years before they finally realize they aren't going to make it. That's an exaggeration, but not much of one. Don't waste your time waiting for their announced products, especially chipsets, because the are either very late, or never come out.
One more thing to mention is, Kabini is now old hat for AMD. The numbers Tom's published, without making much mention of it, were supplied by VIA, and are comparing a processor over a year old, with one not currently available. The dolts at Tom's didn't figure it might be worth mentioning the Puma performs much better at low wattages, and it's available now. The fastest Puma outperforms the Kabini here by a good amount(mainly because of having a 'turbo' mode, while still coming in at a 15 watt TDP. Not that doubling the performance per watt would matter much, or be worth mentioning, right Tom's? At lower wattage, the performance per watt is even more exaggerated in favor of Puma, but that's not relevant to this article.
I'll give you a hint, the Kabini 5350's Multimedia performance was 47.56. Guess you missed that by more than an order of magnitude, huh? It didn't look strange to you? Didn't think to double check it? The editor that read it after didn't either? Again, you buffoons are smart enough to write about this stuff. How about talking about a joystick or something?
Also, to clarify on VIA's x86 processors, they are actually an American team known as Centaur. They bought this company from another company that owned Centaur (IDT). They have always been in the business of making low cost processors that performed 'good enough', but keeping things very simple. They got more complex, and then AMD opened the boom on them with Bobcat, and now Jaguar. They've become irrelevant. Also, they announce products for years before they finally realize they aren't going to make it. That's an exaggeration, but not much of one. Don't waste your time waiting for their announced products, especially chipsets, because the are either very late, or never come out.
One more thing to mention is, Kabini is now old hat for AMD. The numbers Tom's published, without making much mention of it, were supplied by VIA, and are comparing a processor over a year old, with one not currently available. The dolts at Tom's didn't figure it might be worth mentioning the Puma performs much better at low wattages, and it's available now. The fastest Puma outperforms the Kabini here by a good amount(mainly because of having a 'turbo' mode, while still coming in at a 15 watt TDP. Not that doubling the performance per watt would matter much, or be worth mentioning, right Tom's? At lower wattage, the performance per watt is even more exaggerated in favor of Puma, but that's not relevant to this article.
i kind of thought those numbers looked rather flawed considering via's best chips were only 2/3's as powerful as the amd/intel worst solution and suffered heavily from an older bus speed that was roughly 1/3 of what those solutions were also as if they were licensing old bus architecture. that would make sense considering their finances.
also Tom's has sort of gone the way of Via. they only display what they are paid to display nowdays. i take most of what is said as worthless bantering drivel as it's now the gossip channel (very fitting for a french news tabloid now). there isn't much of hardware news or tech depth or investigation into hardware any more. thomas is extremely difficult to replace it seems.
It also went to Via. Cyrix was purchased by National Semiconductor, who then had financial losses, slowly reduced the design team, and then sold Cyrix to Via. Via, who had already bought Centaur for their CPUs merged the two together. Sounds like it had the makings to do something great, but I have the feeling the loss of engineers and under funding the project lead to the rather low CPUs we have seen from them instead of the high end chips that could of been.
Likely the problem was that Intel switched to a new socket and didn't allow other CPU manufacturers to use their socket, and AMD did the same. So to be competitive they would of had to make a new socket also and try to gain enough market share to be valuable would of been tough.
Likely the problem was that Intel switched to a new socket and didn't allow other CPU manufacturers to use their socket, and AMD did the same. So to be competitive they would of had to make a new socket also and try to gain enough market share to be valuable would of been tough.
It especially would have been a problem when all of this shook out, back in the very competitive Athlon vs p3 and p4 days. Intel did take some pity on them and allowed them to use socket 370 for a while though, unfortunately the C3's were wholly inadequate when compared to anything else at the time. They did use much less power and come in awesome Tins though.