VIA Announces VIA Nano X2 Dual-Core Processor

fellix

Veteran
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Product Highlights
  • Advanced multi-core processing
  • Power-efficient out-of-order x86 architecture
  • Full support for 64-bit operating systems
  • High-performance superscalar processing
  • Most efficient speculative floating point algorithm
  • Full processor virtualization support
  • Advanced power and thermal management
  • VIA PadLock hardware security features
  • Pin-to-pin compatibility with other VIA processors
Source
 
Well considering those CPU cores are slower per clock then an ancient Pentium M, maybe it doesn't matter. Pentium M ran on the 400 and 533 MT/s rates.
 
Of course. Would have liked a more elegant solution though.

But Via shouldn't mind me however, as it's highly likely I wouldn't buy anything like that at all.
 
Non external bus communications has the adavntage of reducing power comsumption, that's sad for a processor that's slower and older than anything that amd and intel and can hope to compete only on the power efficience :S
 
coupled with the VN1000 chipset it seems to match AMD's bobcat Fusion in features and performance, sort of. maybe using some more power and with worse drivers and losing overall, but I'm eager too see the comparison.

an interesting niche would be small/medium business server or advanced (geek's) home server, as it's got both virtualisation extensions and crypto acceleration this time.
or a business laptop with encrypted drive (especially one with a SSD)
 
Walmart self-checkout. :D Those could use an upgrade IMHO. I think they used VIA C5 in them (?). ;)
 
I follewed via's processors from the start, hoped to buy one when mini itx was new, but performance wise the biggest real problem was the price
Now with fusion and sandybridge completely stealing the chipset businnes, or the low power cpu and gpu, i can't see how via can survive...
they need a full shift
 
VIA PV530 is very cheap (but it's the older, C7 generation with 100Mbits networking).
It sure used to be way overpriced, funnily the more powerful Atom boards brought the prices down.

VIA might have a chance but the price pressure makes things hard for them.
the best move they could do is significantly cooperate with the open source community (openchrome drivers) and carve out a linux niche for themselves imo.
 
via nano is quite power efficientfor a 65 nm product, and it is very very efficient performance wise, I mean clock per clock comparison. I would place it a bit above a bobcat core (if i extrapolate with the performances vs atom core). I expect the nano x2 to be quite competitive perforance wise for the cpu part, but probably weak if we compare the whole platform vs brazos.
what Via needs is a nvidia GPU... something like ION and it would make quite a nice platform. I think there were talks with Nvidia, but they somewhat failed.
 
here's the VN1000 chipset and dual core preview, from a little while back.
using a 65nm dual core nano that won't get released but should be the same, only using more power than final version. tested against ION, ION2 and core i3
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-520-nano-dc-vn1000,2779.html

the VN1000 includes an IGP from the Chrome 500 series, DX10.1 support, and showing good results!

VIA actually have had non ridiculous, I-wish-it-were-good-this-time GPUs for a while, improving but lost in the competition's pressure. (so, here's again a $70 S3 chrome card that makes an impressive showing against $40 ATI and nvidia cards, beating them in some results, and we're only selling it in parts of Asia..)

they mostly lack better drivers, I wish them good luck again in that sisyphean task.
 
the VN1000 includes an IGP from the Chrome 500 series, DX10.1 support, and showing good results!
Against Ion/Ion 2, yes (the first is quite slow anyway the second a bit better but often held back by the slow cpu even). But against Zacate using these numbers, it would lose. Of course, against atom igp, it would blow it away, but just about anything does so.

they mostly lack better drivers, I wish them good luck again in that sisyphean task.
I think they just don't have the sales volume to afford a large driver team.

But really, I think the big problem is that Brazos platform will be cheaper (using less chips it's definitely simpler). It might hold up quite well overall in performance with Zacate (maybe a bit faster on the cpu side though I'm not convinced yet, a bit slower on the gpu side), but likely need a bit more power, with (I expect) a higher price. Couple that with worse drivers, and there just doesn't seem to be much incentive to prefer that to Zacate (ok it does have some things like the AES offload but overall it just looks to me like Brazos would do everything as well if not better).
 
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