Written by Nicolas Gridelet
Published on May 29, 2008

URL: http://www.behardware.com/news/lire/29-05-2008/#9694

It was finally today that VIA has officially launched the first five Nano processors equipped with the Isaiah core.

Their creator announces that they are now available for OEMs and motherboard vendors. Otherwise, systems that integrate it should arrive on the market in the third quarter.

You may recall that this is the firstx86 64bit CPU from VIA. It comes after a two year delay and was conceived by Centaur Technology, the CPU subsidiary of this Taiwanese company. The processor still uses the FSB800, but some models support the FSB1333. Engraved in 65nm by Fujitsu, there is virtualization technology similar to that used by Intel. It has two L1 caches of 64 KB and L2 16-way type associative cache increases to 1 MB.

Of course, it is pin-to-pin compatible with the C7 and as on this former model, the ex-chipset giant insists on the low level of power consumption which can be lowered to as little as 0.1W in idle. As for performances, the first benches, which appeared in early April, are generally encouraging even if the FPU is still rather weak. The very recent press release specifies that it is optimized for the heaviest applications, which includes Blu-ray Disc™ HD video playback and the latest PC games, such as Crysis. This may be the case for more powerful models (in the future there will be 2 GHz, dual cores in late 2009 and 45nm engraving), but it seem a bit too optimist for the U2300.

Still this could be an alternative to the Intel Atom in certain segments as well as the fact that it will be at the center of the VN "nVIAdia" platform, which will have a DirectX 10 IGP and a price announced at less than $45.


A PDF document with all of these details and benchmarks opposing it to the C7 is available here!