- Monday, 9 November 2009
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Americans adore me, and will go on adoring me, until I say something nice about them - GBS
Via releases VX855 media processor
TAIWANESE CHIP SHOP VIA has unleashed a new media system processor which it promises will reduce the power drain of watching high definition video in PCs and mobile devices.
Compatible with the company's own Nano CPU, the VX855 chipset incorporates both north and south bridges into a single 27mm square package which Via reckons is 46 per cent smaller than current twin-chip core logic implementations.
Drawing just 2.3 watts, negating the need for fans, the chip integrates a high performance DDR2 memory controller, a 400/800MHz FSB processor interface, and support for 6 USB 2.0 ports, SDIO, UART, SPI, LPC and SMBus in a single chunk of silicon.
Chrome9 graphics, HD audio, and loads of display interfaces are built in as well as hardware decoding for the leading video standards and three eight-channel streams of 32-bit audio at rates up to 192kHz. µ
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Great - when will it be delivered? And when will decent drivers be available? My experience with previous VIA platforms has not been very convincing. Supposedly available hardware acceleration never worked, and a 1.5GHz CPU performed like an old sub GHz PIII. I like underdogs, but they have to perform...
whats the price for it?
@PCP69: This thing is not maid for a PC, its designed for Blueray-Player, HD-Tuner and such things, so you dont need much CPU Power
"TAIWANESE CHIP SHOP VIA has unleashed a new media system processor which it promises will reduce the power drain of watching high definition video in PCs and mobile devices."
Don't see any mention of Blu-Ray players and the like.
. . . Via should totally use this chip with Atom for the "alternative platform"
. . . better than intel for graphics and better than both Intel and Nvidia as power draw. The ultimate Atom platform (I know the Nano is better performing but Atom is the buzzword now and Via could maintain a high interest in its offerings)
You got it backwards - it's a north bridge and south bridge in one chip, made specifically for a PC. PCP69's point still stands, the old Via chips were in-order dogs. Fortunately, Nano is a better out-of-order design and they are actually getting design wins. The power draw for this chipset is hands-down better than the Intel 945 northbridge. Hopefully it will make it to UMPCs, total power consumption will be lower even though the Nano takes more power than the Atom. Kudos to Via.
I think they need to try and target smaller devices. Put the CPU on the same chip and even a few memory chips and you would truely have a system on a chip. What are the new 40nm memory chips up to per chip... 1/2 GB? Add a chip of flash memory for say 8GB and you can even skip the hard drive on a tiny system. That would be 4 chips total for CPU, chipset, memory and storage. Think of the ultra portables you could do with this. You could have something about the size of a potable CD player that would be a complete system with a laptop Blu-ray drive. You could ten make it a UMPC with a touchscream and a few buttons or make it a tiny desktop system. Include some USB ports, WiFi, Blue Tooth, and an HDMI port and you would have a pretty good system. For something bigger they could have a larger board with a memory slot and a connector for a hard drive.
Not a bad idea, but impractical, every time you add more features to a chip the more chance you have of faulty chips, and in this case, each time a chip is faulty there goes one full sale, rather than just a part of it say the memory etc. If they were going to do this, the would probably wait for either the tech to mature, or for a tech shrink at which point they can do more for the same surface area cost on the wafer.
Coupled with an OLED screen and suddenly those big heavy laptops become far more attractive.