Life is a long preparation for something that never happens - WB Yeats
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VIA launches its first quad core processor
FURTHERING THE NOTION that real men don't really need fabs to make a living in the semiconductor business, ever discrete VIA Technologies has been chipping away at a quad core processor design of its own. Shockingly enough, it is the company's second CPU announcement of the year.
The fabless chip designer has launched it's VIA QuadCore (sic) processor, which unastonishingly features four cores built into two separate dies, reminiscent of early quad-core designs from Intel and AMD, based on VIA's Isaiah architecture.
The 40nm 64-bit CPU fabbed by TSMC runs at a green 1.2+GHz, which leads VIA to herald it as the lowest power quad core processor on the market today at just 27.5W TDP. However, the company fails to mention the marketing friendly "performance-per-watt" ratio that system integrators treasure so much.
The cores sport a total of 4MB L2 cache and communicate via the rather ancient VIA V4 Bus running at 1333MHz. The "adaptive overclocking" feature gives us only an inkling of a clue into what VIA can do to the chip when needed, although digging a bit deeper we were told that the chips can overclock themselves up to 1.46GHz.
Judging by the packaging, it also seems that VIA will be tooting this CPU's drop-in compatibility with current Nano systems, which means instant upgrades at the cost of a BIOS update, at most.
The VIA "Nano" quad core has a few sysadmin pleasing features like an on-the-fly AES encryption engine and VIA's VT Virtualization, which will make it a feasible solution provided it is being sold at an affordable price. From a feature point of view, this quad core processor has its niche carved out for it in the server market, however the problem, from where we're standing, is VIA's track record of design wins, or rather the lack thereof.
No pricing is available, but it's hard to imagine seeing one of these sitting pretty on a shop shelf. µ
Tags: Hardware
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When VIA first came out with their built-in crypto accelerator and provided full specs for it, I took interest. This chip would make a great IPSec gateway if each core has its own crypto engine. Systems integrators could take, say, OpenBSD and add an MCSE-friendly GUI on top of it and make plenty of money.
AMD have had the Mobile Phenom II P920 1.6GHz on the market since last year, it's 25W. A little dissapointing.
Beat me to it :)
AMD never used two dual cores to make a quad core CPU like Intel did/does, which is one reason why it took so much longer for AMD to get their first quad core out the door compared to Intel.