VIA has been a long-time maker of competing x86-based products. Their products have not always been well known as their market share is very small due to limited manufacturing abilities and poorly performing products (their x86 FPU was half-clocked until the most recent iteration before Nano). Still, they have kept the pace over the years and have produced processors that require very little power suitable for low-end notebooks and desktop computer system.s And now, they are prepping a 64-bit version, called VIA Nano.
##CONTINUE##Nano was officially announced in May, 2008, though no individual products have yet been sold. Some websites have had reviews and benchmarks out. VIA’s new Trinity platform, a Mini-ITX 2.0 reference system employing their VX800 low-power chipset and either a Nano or C7 CPU and S3 Chrome graphics allow for DirectX 10.1 and hardware support for Blu-ray and other popular HD video formats using an HDMI interface.
Isaiah, the codename for Nano, is believed to be releasing to the general public in early 2009 as a pin-compatible replacement for existing C7 and C7-M models. It will provide full x86-64 support while also extending performance levels above the previous C7 core design. It uses VIA’s proprietary 800MHz FSB technology (following a licensing dispute with Intel which forced it away from using Intel’s bus architecture), and has been shown to compete really well against Intel’s Atom-based systems, often outperforming them and routinely coming in with better power numbers, despite the 65nm process technology compared to Atom’s 45nm.
VIA has always held a special place in my heart. I’ve had several C3 systems (the Ezra core which was developed before C7) over the years. They’ve been very low power chips that did not require active cooling. For router purposes they made perfectly silent boxes which did their job without affecting the electric bill or the noise level. Very nice.
Interestingly, VIA has used Biblical names for nearly all of their products. The earliest modern CPU (Cyrix III) was based on the Joshua core. Next came Samuel, then Samuel 2 (there are two books in the Bible called Samuel), after that was Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and now Isaiah. They’ve introduced Eden and Trinity in there as well for marketing names.
I would very much like to get my hands on a Nano, a BIOS upgrade, and see what it’s capable of. Nano also continues the tradition of on-board hardware random number generators. I did some preliminary studies with this technology for my TonFang notebook review for Geek.com, which used a C7-M or Celeron CPU. The results of the RNG were not consistent, though I never did follow-up with that study. If I’m able to get hold of a Nano I’ll continue that study and publish the results.
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BY Rick Hodgin
Source：geek.com
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