Best rig for PACMAN games.

Heh. I wonder if this little guy rivals a single Phenom core clock-for-clock. I wouldn't be surprised if it did. :)

Long live the Winchip 2! (it was sorta neat!)

Problem with Henry's view on microprocessers is he's building for what is required now and what people need, not to push forward technology. it reminds me of going to tech school instead of college. One prepares you for a job and another prepares you to make jobs for others.

They'll never be able to take the lead in anything that way, VIA will just fight for the scraps left in Intel and AMD's wake. If you always enjoy being second best, I suppose this is the best way to go.

I was wondering if via would bite the bullet and stuff everything into one die.

I wonder who the first manufacturer will be who stuffs 1 core a small graphics core, a 64 bit memory controller and a link that would attach to a SB that would deal with all the IO/ pad intensive stuff.

ps when did the front page BB become case sensitive for the Name field?

If the motherboards with this CPU on it are priced right, then I'm definitely interested in building a silent HTPC system around it.

Also here's hoping that a future EeePC or similar will be using this chip.

At 60mm^2 the 65nm die is nearly twice the area of the 90nm C7, but 60mm^2 is still very small (smaller than the 130nm C3 IIRC). VIA will be getting loads off of a 12 inch wafer, so there's hope that the price will be good.

I got an EPIA800 motherboard / system around 5 years ago. It was very neat, although not the best CPU power in the world. The insane thing is that the price of the components has hardly dropped since then - newer boards just cost more and more and more. Hmm, actually the EPIA-ML8000 costs more than the EPIA800 did back in the day, despite the exchange rate changing so much the price should be even lower.

Good for them. That's no small task.

It's going to be interesting seeing this go up against Silverthorne. Intel's entrant my legitimize (and perhaps vastly expand) the product segment, but it looks like it will be at quite a different power/performance point. It will be an interesting segment indeed where VIA is the performance leader and Intel is the low-power champion.

Centaur has outfitted Isaiah with a range of power-saving technologies, including a dynamic clock scaling mechanism similar to Intel's SpeedStep that alternates between a pair of PLLs to achieve very quick multiplier transitions.

I thought the point made by Centaur during the demonstration was that it was *unlike* Intel's implementation because Intel shuts off the FSB and halts execution during P-state changes, whereas the Isaiah CPU doesn't because it does things differently with the dual-PLL setup?

Doesn't the C7 already have clock scaling similar to Intel's Speedstep or AMD's PowerNow!, and this is just taking it further?

I'm sure this will never happen but I wouldn't mind a 478 socket compatible version of these. If the performance is ok it would be a nice way to turn an older power hungry machine into a power sipping machine.

Three competitor is alot better than two. Nice! Go go go!

Hey, those guys are still alive, thank lord. What ever happened to Intel threatening to take its x86 license away? I remember it had something to do with a rock and a hard place.

This would be perfect for a small passivly cooled home theater PC. I hope they have some sort of speed reduction power saving scheme like C-n-C or SpeedStep to make having one of these on next to the TV practical.

Just when you thought that the PC market can't get any worst than it is already in. now a third player in the cpu arena??. Great now thats just going to really kill off PC gaming. Its hard enough as it is trying to stay afloat. Why add more fuel to the fire?

I'd really like to see VIA get into large scale x86 processing, such as C2D's or the Athlon's. It'd be interesting to see what kind of improvements they can achieve with a larger power envelope and larger die size.

I want one of these in an EEE v2 with an 8-16GB SSD and a larger screen. That would be really sweet for mobile movies.

I would love to see a pico-itx with that 2GHz and a DVI or HDMI out on it. That and a small SSHD would make a nice little computer for internet/pictures/blu-ray on your TV.

But he scoffs at the notion that people need multiple cores in basic computing devices right now.

Depends. If it's a desktop, then I disagree. Going from my dual core to my Mom's single core is just painful. However, seeing as how these are not marketed for desktops so much as low-power applications, which in all likely will only be doing one thing anyways (such as internet appliances), I can kinda see their rational. Still, it's very good that they were forward thinking enough to to build Isaiah for multi-core.

Very cool article. Thanks Scott. I'm anxious to see how these CPUs are put to use.

Very well done article. I've read a couple of articles on this story and this one is by far the best.

Personally, I find the idea of doubling performance for the same power draw and heat more exciting than what's happening on desktops right now. CPUs are taking more and more juice to run and improvements are all too often coming in number of cores rather than power per core.

I can see these processors going everywhere. If they have a low power chip that works really well, they can probably make a high power chip that runs much faster. I'm curios to see if they expand into the laptop or desktop market with this chip.

That's pretty neat, interesting read too. I've always thought that for the majority of tasks for the majority of people, current dual-core CPUs well exceed what is neccessary.

On top of the usual comparisons (seemingly required to give C7=500MHz P3 type comment) it'd be interesting to see how these chips compared to current dual cores before higher P states kick in i.e. can a Core2Duo at idle (1.6GHz in most cases) crunch through a bench in the same time as an Isiah CPU at load.

I can't tell you how in love I am with VIA & Centaur products. They are so engineering-awesome!

Scott, if you're still in Austin, you should check out Kerbey Lane Cafe (breakfast foods, plus awesome queso), Maudie's Cafe (Mexican), & Rudy's BBQ (...BBQ!).

I would also be glad to buy you a beer somewhere (Gingerman)! :D

The benchmarks will be interesting. I would like to see them and how it would do vs some of the old chips that might still be out and about. Along with benchmarks for newer lower end systems.

It would have been nice if the article mentioned the TDP targets for the 1.2GHz ULV and 2.0GHz parts, mostly because Centaur puts so much emphasis on TDP. It's kind of funny that they used a 3850 to assist in the bluray decoding test since we all know AMD's 3000 series (and Nvidia's 8000, for the most part) can pretty much offload all this off the CPU. That said, I'm sure Isaiah will be a good match for the 3450 in low-power, small-form-factor systems.

I must say that I do find this architecture a bit exciting since since it could lead to some interesting ultraportable laptop designs... think Asus' Eee with a faster CPU without increasing power draw much, if at all.

#4, Well, he DID say "basic" computing devices. Hell, I think ultraportable laptops can get away with single-core, too, unless they're used as your primary computer.

Wow, I'm actually interested in a VIA cpu. Good stuff. Hopefully they'll be able to ship silicon in a reasonable amount of time.