New VIA x86 CPU Takes Aim At Intel Silverthorne

Kaz writes "While not operating on the same scale as the two major CPU designers, VIA has been gaining traction in the world of UMPCs and thin clients with its Eden and C7 lines of processors. While past architectures have been considerably out-of-date in terms of modern features, the new Isaiah architecture looks to be very competitive with what AMD and Intel have lined up for future ultra-mobile products. It features an out-of-order, superscalar execution core, 64-bit support, virtualization, and even SSE3 — all on a 94M-transistor, 65nm process die. The initial offering will be single-core only, though VIA says that multi-core ability is already designed in. Is Isaiah going to replace your Core 2 system for gaming? No, but it might give Intel's Silverthorne a run for the money."

Re:Sorry, brother.

[glop]

Google says:
Support VIA C7 @ 1.5 GHz D (TDP 25 W). VIA C7 @ 1.5 GHz (TDP 12 W). VIA C7 @ 1.3 GHz (TDP ... VIA C7 @ 1.2 GHz LV (TDP 7 W). VIA C7 @ 1.0 GHz LV (TDP 5 W)

So the C7 can be a 5W part too. Which is not too bad for a 1GHz CPU.

I guess the ISAIAH will have such a version too. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

Re:Sorry, brother.

[Anonymous Coward]

They misspoke then, the current Via will get 20 watts peak, if you include the systemboard. The processor (c7-d) is 10 watts of that. They have another processor (c7), at somewhat lower speed (1 ghz instead of 1.5), that runs on 2 watts or somesuch.

Please note the 'peak' intel measures its wattage on averages, not peaks like AMD/VIA.

Re:"out of date"?

[Sly-Guy]

Take a look at the newer VIA VB7001G board. It may be the C7-D processor, but from logicsupply dot com it is $123. Not a hugely cheap board, but quite nicely priced for a mini-ITX board. The only drawback is that some of the cases cost almost more than the M/B itself!

Also the gOS boards are quite nice, though at micro-ATX are harder to fit in to a low power solution... I have two of these, one running my router with a dual Netflex-3 card (yeah I know, older 10/100, but I don't need any faster) and it runs quite well.

I'd be interested to see how this new chip/chipset combo works in say a HTPC and if it does HD content well. None of the current VIA Unichrome chipsets do HD very well.

Mark

VIA processors and motherboards

[SCHecklerX]

I've had nothing but good luck with them. Combined with a mini-itx fanless case, these things make great appliances. Here's a great place to get them:

http://www.logicsupply.com/ [logicsupply.com]

At work, we used the mini-itx with fanless case for branch office VPN solutions using linux + openswan (which in turn connected back to checkpoint clusters as well as other branch office openswan gateways). At home, I have a VIA chipset m/b with an Athlon 3000+ processer which has been running great for me for a few years.

Re:Sorry, brother.

[RingDev]

VIA's Pico-ITX full systems (not just the chip) have already by clocked at 14w idle, 16w max in pre-release reviews from 6 months ago. The previous generation C7s can easily be throttled back to stay at 5w on the proc as needed. I'm not sure if such functionality is available on the new Pico systems though.

Intel is "shooting for" a 5w processor (no clarification if this is max load, or idle) in 2010.

VIA's Pico-ITX is already available at 1ghz, and the previous generation C7's are available up to 2ghz.

Intel's Silverthorne processor is also aiming for the Pentium M era performance (900mhz - 2.3ghz).

Yes, the initial Silverthorne release is slated for Q1-Q2 2008, but the performance goals you mentioned aren't slated until 2010. So what I'm saying here, is that you can already buy everything that Intel is "shooting for" 2 years before they plan on reaching those goals. With all likelihood, the 2008 release of the Silverthorne will be a 1ghz proc sucking down 20w at peak. Which will put it right in competitive range of the C7 and new Pico-ITX.

-Rick

Re:Follow The Trend

[maxwell demon]

I re-read the post you replied to several times, but couldn't find the place where it advocated replacing the cache memory with DRAM. Instead it was about new memory technology yet to be found. Here's the relevant quote, with emphasis by me:

"If you can find a CMOS-compatible, high-density (e.g. - SRAM's six transistors per cell is toooo big) memory technology, then we're going to be at the point where we can simply replace the cache memory with on-board memory. If said on-chip memory technology is nonvolatile, then we're talking panacea cakes, batman."

I'm interested to see your non-volatile DRAM. :-)

OK, I grant you that he didn't explicitly talk about performance requirements. However, if he considered DRAM as sufficient, why would he have asked for new memory technology?

Re:I've got a C7 running a home email server.

[tknd]

For a while I was on a mission to build a really power efficient PC. Unfortunately when I got my AC power meter, I learned a number of disappointing things:

• Power specifications are incredibly hard to find. One good resource is actually Dell's specification sheets.
• Most of the inefficiency is in the power supply. In the past PSUs were made incredibly cheaply and even good brands were selling 70% or less efficient PSUs. When a system consumes 100 watts at the plug, that means 30 watts are wasted at the PSU. This has become a lot better with 80+ ratings, but you still have the issue where efficiency tends to drop as power consumption drops.
• The next big culprit is the video card. The best card I ever found was an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP. They still make them and the power consumption is somewhere in the low single digit watts. Other good options are probably Intel's onboard graphics chips. I think the latest intel integrated x3100 has a max draw of 9 watts (found it somewhere on dell's spec sheets).
• Another huge culprit is the motherboard. Motherboards these days come with everything. For something like a server you don't need the fancy soundcard. The fancy secondary raid chip is also probably useless. They simply don't make plain vanilla motherboards anymore. Also the chipsets (especially nVidia's chipsets) are horrible with power consumption. There are nearly no specifications available for motherboard chipset power consumption but from my experience it can be anywhere from 10 to 30 watts total.
• Laptop parts are the best. If you can build your entire server out of laptop parts, that would be ideal. Laptop parts usually have the right configurations for clocking down the CPU, not having a power hungry motherboard, and having efficient parts along with it (wireless, hard drives). For example a 2.5" laptop hard drive even while spinning will consume around 2 to 3 watts. A normal 3.5" hard drive on the other hand can suck 7 watts while spinning. I still haven't come close to beating my dell pentium M laptop in terms of power even with a Via Eden 600mhz system with nothing but a hard drive attached. The laptop would idle at 26 watts (screen off) while the Via would idle at 40watts.
• Todays CPUs (intel core, a64 single cores) are incredibly efficient. For example I was able to build a 45watt idle AMD64 single core system. The trick is you have to pick the other parts carefully. The board I have (Asus Via board, they no longer make it) allowed me to clock down the CPU to 1000mhz and lower the voltage.
• For really small server tasks, you may want to consider purchasing a wireless router and turning it into a server by using custom firmware like DD-WRT. Some wireless routers come with usb ports which will allow you to easily attach some flash memory for storage. Routers are also naturally headless so you don't have extra useless overhead from sound and video. To top it all off they come with 3 interfaces! One for the wan, another for the lan, and a wireless interface. What more could you ask for!

Even the C7 has "even SSE3"...

[TeknoHog]

but as the article said, this time it's more powerful. The C7 is not particularly strong because of its in-order execution core, and the new CPU appears to fix this.

For the record, my 2 GHz C7 machine can play a 720p h.264 video smoothly, but only without sound :) This is using MPlayer, no hardware acceleration except Xvideo.

Re:Troll. Was Re:Follow The Trend

[LWATCDR]

"What he means is: forget on-chip cache -- on-chip main memory. IOW, instead of having main memory on the motherboard, it would be embedded into your processor, running, presumable, at the same speed as the CPU."
  Memory on the die has been done in micro controlers for years. It isn't going to happen on PCs for a long time.

"A CPU like this new VIA CPU might be slow, but if you had sufficient memory integrated right on the CPU die, it would blow the pants off your latest 4+GHz Core 2 Duo."

What is sufficient memory? 4 GB or Maybe 512 MB? There is a reason that they use Static ram for cache. It needs to be fast. So lets say that you get 512 MB on the die are you not going to allow the user to add more memory? Or how about this. You put 512 MB on the die and then let them add memory on the buss if they need more. And then you could have it swap memory from the slower buss memory in to the fast on die memory to speed everything up... Yea and we could call it a cache!

Until you can put the full address space on the die it will not work for anything but microcontrollers.

Re:Troll. Was Re:Follow The Trend

[LWATCDR]

"I don't claim to know a whole lot about processor tech, but I know that it wouldn't be hard to add this sort of optimization."
It is hard and it has been done. That is exactly what the cache does.
The tasks that need the memory the most stay in the cache longest.

Re:Sorry, brother.

[RightSaidFred99]

You're full of it. Silverthorne is due for Q1-Q2 2008, 1-2 watts, and Pentium 3 performance circa 2004 (which still puts it well ahead of what Via is doing anywhere within 10x that much wattage).

My first clue you were full of crap was this: "Silverthorne will be a 1ghz proc sucking down 20w at peak". I'm not sure if you pay attention, but Intel has Core 2 Solo chips running at 1.06/1.2Ghz that peak at 5.5 watts. Silverthorne is a 45nm chip running on a simplified core-2-esque march, and you're making this ridiculous claim that it will "suck down" 20w at peak.

Seriously, 2006 called, it wants its news back.

Re:Sorry, brother.

[RingDev]

That's fine that you feel that way. Now show me a news report, white paper, press release, or ANYTHING that backs those numbers up.

The only press release that I could find that had actual numbers on it said that 5w was the goal of the product line by 2010. So if you have something better to go by than armchair techno-forecasting, please, go ahead and post it.

-Rick

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Follow The Trend

[imroy]

Cache memories are consuming most of the die in your typical high-performance CPU, these days.

On single-threaded CPU's, perhaps. But look at the Sun UltraSPARC T1 [wikipedia.org] and T2. They are multithreaded - each core rotates between up to four threads on each clock cycle. When a cache miss occurs, it simply pulls the affected thread from rotation and continues with the remaining threads while fetching the data in the background. This means cache misses have a much smaller impact on performance than they do on single-threaded CPU's. Thus they need much less cache to maintain performance and throughput.

Putting main memory on the die just isn't practical, except for application-specific embedded microprocessors. It would be expensive and wouldn't actually give you much of a speed increase. Cache is a way of using a small amount of fast memory to speed up some slow memory. The nice thing about it is that the speed increase is out of proportion to its size because of common access patterns. And it's transparent.