Friday 25th January 2008

VIA announces Isaiah CPU, and it might actually be good

Posted at: 11:33am 25th January 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

New x86 CPU has 'world's fastest floating point,' and can apparently play Crysis too

If you ever had the misfortune to pay for your tight fisted ways by buying a Cyrix processor in the 1990s, then you'll know that floating-point calculations weren't Cyrix's strong point. In fact, floating point calculations have still been a problem for VIA's CPUs after the company bought Cyrix from National Semiconductor, which is why you will never find an EPIA gaming system. As such, it may come as a massive surprise to find that VIA is claiming that its latest CPU architecture has the 'world's fastest floating point.'

Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology Inc, a subsidiary of VIA, proudly boasted that 'with a team of less than one hundred first-class engineers, we have created from scratch the world's most power-efficient x86 processor architecture with state of the art features, outstanding performance, and flexible scalability for the future.'

VIA has apparently decided to abandon its old CPU architecture, and design a new one with an 'ultra modern 64-bit superscalar, speculative, out-of-order microarchitecture' from scratch. The result is the biblically named Isaiah, which VIA says offers up to four times the power of its predecessor, the C7, while consuming the same amount of power.

It's about time, of course. Back in the 1990s, Cyrix used to justify the floating-point problems by saying that hardly any software used a floating point processor, but that hasn't been the case for some time now. VIA says that it's also improved the pre-fetching and branch prediction in the CPU over its predecessors, and that the architecture features a full 64-bit instruction set. As well as this, the CPU will also have two 64KB Level 1 cache units (one for data and one for instruction), along with 1MB of Level 2 cache.

Unlike AMD and Intel, VIA still hasn't decided to jump on to the multi-core bandwagon, and Isaiah is currently only a single core architecture. As such, VIA isn't pitching it at high-end desktops, but reckons it could be used for media centre PCs and PVRs, particularly with the CPU's incredibly low TDP of just 20W, which means it won't require much in the way of cooling. As well as this, it also looks like you can use it to play games. US tech site HardOCP has had a chance to play Crysis using the CPU, and says that it was 'more than up to the task.'

At launch, the 65nm CPU will be clocked at just 1GHz with an 800MHz FSB and SSE3 support, but VIA has plans to take this up to 2GHz with a 1,333MHz FSB and SSE4 support in the future.

Interestingly, VIA is also claiming to be making advances in the miniature motherboards market, with a new diminutive Mobile-ITX board planned. The board will measure just 7.5cm x 4.5cm, and is scheduled for launch in the next couple of years.

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Comments

Any word on when these are going to be released to buy?

Comment by l3v1ck at 7:01pm 8th March 2008

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i 100% agree with that and i personally think the cpu is the biggest most annoyingly big energy waster in any pc or even any house. the gpus are coming on pretty well as time goes on but for this year its all gonna be about computer monitors (LCD, LED, ect) and energy saving hardware because AMD have already been working on this alot lately but they just need to up there game a tad bit and i think they'll start getting back on foot even if intel is faster or cheaper because after all i think anyone would preferre to pay a tad more at that moment to never have to pay a giant bill again so lets all say good bye to rip off people like npower and british gas hey guys and thinking about it im gonna look on ebay for some solar panels for my house lol

Comment by smiler at 2:39pm 28th January 2008

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CPU interesting, good grammer better

Smiler, please use punctuation! My head hurts:¬@

Comment by Sc0tsg1t at 2:59pm 28th January 2008

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power race

I've mentioned it before, but the speed war (MHz) is on hold for the time being, the core-war isn't really happening (unless AMD or Intel suddenly bring out an 8-core CPU!). The next battle will be over power cunsumption/CPU power ratio's and the time is right. Energy bills are rising fast (in the UK at least) and with the increase in CPU power consumption & heat output that comes with faster speed & more cores, the time is right for all the big players (and this includes motherboard, memory, graphics & sound manufacturers) to start looking at making the same leaps & bounds n energy efficiency we saw when everyone jumped from CRT to TFT (17" CRT - 100W: 19" TFT - 35W) If component developers can substantially reduce power consumption while keeping output at more or less the levels we're at now then that would be a huge leap forward. Imagine your current machine (whatever it's spec) consuming at most half the electricity that it currently does. Move over Core Wars, Watt Conflict is the next level of engagement.

Comment by EdArch at 12:19pm 28th January 2008

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scary at the same time as cool

i think this might actually make the cpu market go somewhere because its just been on pause because AMD wanna see what intel are chucking in the ring first and the same vice versa so they have got good guns but by the time they chuck them on the shelf people are dissapointed like the new phenom i bought one and its brill (9600 BE) but not as good as expected for how long we have been waiting so maybe this is just gonna kick AMD and Intel up the rear and get us some good CPU's now with DDR4 availabillity. and i admit if VIA compete i am scared AMD n Intel will go bankrupt because VIA are using sence when they do something like now they aint chucking a cpu in the big world because they know custompc will slag it off cuz it aint intel after all custompc slags anything off if it aint intel or nvidia thats one reason i dont read custompc anymore because they judge everything by brand name where as in mags like micromart you get exactly the real truth about hardware and if there werent mags like custompc i think maybe there would be 1 or 2 more cpu n gpu manufacturers by now... (think about it...)

Comment by smiler at 8:59am 28th January 2008

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For basic office application use, I agree that these chips could do very well in ultra portable laptops. With only 20w TDP, the battery life could be very good indeed.

Comment by l3v1ck at 8:19am 26th January 2008

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if they did smp, theyd hit the light server market dead straight and center.

Comment by thegreat0mi at 2:34am 26th January 2008

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laptops?

i would like to see more options in the laptop cpu market, intel is good but if we had some variety other than amd's notoriously bad mobile processors it would be great. i really would like to see another player in the cpu market.

Comment by yougotkicked at 7:33pm 25th January 2008

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yeah would be nice to see something on VIA in the mag, and i couldnt agree more with lightning_pete about a cool but potent cpu for the car. nice to see VIA getting back into things.

Comment by MDK_UK at 2:28pm 25th January 2008

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That adds weight to my suggestion for an article on VIA CPU's in the mag.

Comment by l3v1ck at 1:19pm 25th January 2008

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Awesome, desktop comparable performance and a new form factor smaller than Pico ITX. Real homebuilt pocket computing here we come!

Comment by mr_nips at 12:36pm 25th January 2008

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Could be good

i like the idea of having it as my second pc. With the loudness of my gaming rig it sometimes gets to much. To be able to watch films and listen to music with it would be good.

Comment by slayer_dave1 at 12:46pm 25th January 2008

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cOOl

I like the sound of VIA hitting the CPU market, and i also like the idea of a cheap and powerful car-based cpu that requires little cooling ! Well done VIA - Although not many people will be jumping for joy as this is only a single core, give them a few years, till they start competing with Amd and Intel, and drive down even better bargains :)

Comment by Lightning_Pete at 11:59am 25th January 2008

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