Via's Nehemiah arrives with ChastityBelt™

The chip was delayed because of manufacturing problems at TSMC, Via's main foundry.

But Via has introduced a security feature called "Padlock" which it says makes the Nehemiah C3s the first native X86 chips with embedded security features.

The chip uses a Random Number Generator - an idea that Intel proclaimed at one of its Developer Conferences in Palm Springs some years ago - which is generated from CPU and hardware noise.

While Intel pressed ahead with its PNG number, eventually having to retreat, as far as we recall it never implemented its other cunning plan to introduce hardware generated encryption.

Via claims this kind of encryption will avoid the use of separate software drivers.

Via also says the new C3s use Coolstream architecture which will boost performance over non Nehemiah C3s and a claimed 73% for 3D graphics.

The 10 watts chip, which costs $45/1000 and uses Socket 370, includes four pipeline stages, SSE (Screaming Sindy) multimedia instructions, advanced branch prediction, a 64K L2 cache with 16-way associativity and a floating point unit running at the same speed. µ

See Also
Via's Nehemiah re-appeahs
Via Nehemiah almost hiah
Via C3: Nehemiah to sample late Q3
Via's Nehemiah to use socket 478