Via chips missing in action

Plus for the myriad of other small, low-power products using this popular, if not exactly speedy, chip.

The good news for manufacturers was the announcement that the long-promised C7 Esther would be shipping in volume imminently, as would the equally long-promised Luke and Mark CoreFusion processors.

Via's roadmap has had a reputation for being fairly flexible, as demonstrated by the long delay to the nanoITX, and the mysterious disappearing act of the nanoBGA C3 processor. The latter processor was found by manufacturers to be so small that it was horrendously difficult to route, requiring expensive PCBs with many layers. It's for this reason that the C7's nanoBGA2 package has almost doubled in size, despite housing a smaller lump of silicon.

Roadmaps seen by the INQ, dating from March 2005, showed Esther shipping in volume in June 2005, ramping to 2GHz by Q4. A curious hybrid chip called Ruth, effectively a Nehemiah with a V4 bus interface instead of the Intel one, was also supposed to ship in volume from June 2005.

Luke, the first generation CoreFusion product, was due to ship in Q1 2005, followed quickly by Mark, a low-cost version, and a 90nm follow-up, John, in Q3 2005, according to other roadmaps.

However, even after Via's May 2005 announcement that manufacturing had started, the date kept shifting, the introduction clock speed was lowered to 1.5GHz, and by March 31st 2006, the date when Via was obliged to cease shipping any C3 chips, our sauces were still reporting poor availability.

Even as we approach the second half of 2006, only a few products have been spotted using the C7: a low-end laptop, a crossover Smartphone/UMPC and a couple of new Mini ITX boards, and even fewer people have had the opportunity to test and benchmark these products. A similar situation exists for the CoreFusion.

For products based on CPUs theoretically shipping since early 2005, this looks a pretty odd situation. We spoke with our contacts in Taipei today to try to find out what was what, and it was suggested that Mark, Luke and Esther remain in short supply, only now beginning to ease. Ruth was canned and replaced with an Esther at limited- to low-clock speeds, John has disappeared (maybe down the pub), and the CX700 chipset will not be ready for a while.

In addition, the CoreFusion products are not simple to manufacture, being complex multi-chip modules, and one has to question whether this sneaky way around using Intel's bus will go un-queried by the chip-maker's eagle-eyed lawyers forever.

So, all seems less than rosy in Taipei at the moment, with Via banned from shipping C3s, and seemingly unable to ship large volumes of their replacements. This has pushed many embedded designers right into the hands of Chipzilla and Chimpzilla with their frugal "Shelton" Celeron M and Geode NX.

We'll be looking in further detail at the performance and latest updates to these platforms in a later article. µ

See Also
Via introduces tiny, low power C7 CPU
Girlz of Destruction give crowd value for money

L'INQS
VIA show C7 boards at CeBIT
Luke spotted
Intel Terminates CPU Licensing To VIA