Girlz of Destruction give crowd value for money

VIA HAD A LOT to talk about at CeBIT, from cards to CPUs to the ultimate gamer playground. There was a lot going on in the back of Hall 23, and given that most of it was centered around The Girlz of Destruction, there was quite a large crowd.

Let's start with the boring stuff, CPUs. Via announced the C7-M ULV microprocessors at the show. These X86 CPUs run from 1.0-1.5GHz, and do so with a TDP of 3.5W. Last time I checked, that was about half the juice of the next lowest part that plays in the same area. It comes in a 21*21mm package - basically, insanely small.

It is built on IBM's 90 nanometre SOI process, pretty cutting edge for the non-Intel/AMD crowd, so it should run pretty well. No die sizes were given, but from the look of it, it is in the mid-30 square mm range.

For design wins, we showed you a few of the chipset wins already, but there is at least one notebook win for the C7-M, the Medion MIM 2080. It uses the C7-M, the PN800 chipset with embedded graphics, a 15-inch screen and a DVD-R. It is going to retail for about €599.

For more wins, Via nabbed a few board partners for S3 chips, the main one being Axper. If you don't know it, it is the Gigabyte version of Asrock. Axper will have two parts, an S25 and an S27, both out about the time you read this

With the boring stuff out of the way, we come to the fun bits, the Girlz of Destruction, and their new playhouse, the Home of Chrome. It is billed as the world's first dedicated eSports training centre, and you can read about it here. Imagine a house where the whole point is to play games 24/7 against women. Yes, you gamers know what I am talking about, those scary things that sit across the room from you at social events.

This is the place where the Girlz live and play, and there are a couple of guest rooms for visiting trainees. If you happen to be near Sollenktura, drop on by and get your arse handed to you in a game of Quake 4. If you don't happen to be in that part of Sweden, you can always go to the web site and click the 'apply to visit' button. There is no checkbox for n00b on the application, sorry.

There were a bunch of giveaways at the Via booth during Cebit, with everything from Girlz' bracelets to toys to video cards, all you had to do was beat the Girlz. When it became obvious that the people playing could not do that on anything approaching a regular basis, the contest was changed. I learned a long time ago that getting up in front of a crowd to play a 'pro' gamer is asking for humiliation, so I politely declined to partake. Call it self-preservation. µ