Analysis: VIA strikes back with Isaiah: OoOE, Fast SSE3, 3.5 to 25W

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It might have felt as if VIA's CPU designers were sleeping for the last 3 years and asked the packa ge and PCB engineers to keep the company going for the next thousand years. But today, they prove nothing could be further away from the truth.

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My understanding is that the package (same 21x21mm NanoBGA2 format as for the C7) is compatible with not only current Nano ITX boards, but also Pico ITX boards. So the answer should be 'as soon as it starts shipping in real products' in mid-2008... :)
 
Phenom 9500 quad core at 2.3 GHz: 95W TDP.
Isaiah single core at 2.0 GHz: 25W TDP.

Phenom/4 = 23.75
If we peel off the IMC at, say 10 W, it's 21.25. We could probably shave off the .25 by dropping the L3.
It could probably drop 300 MHz and lose 1 W.

If AMD wanted to do it, a single-core Phenom wouldn't look too bad in comparison.
At least in SSE, Phenom does have a 3 specialized pipeline setup, while Isaiah has two specialized pipes.
 
I honestly don't think comparing the 2GHz SKU to Phenom is very fair, because at 2GHz it has to be overvolted a fair bit while 2.3GHz runs at a much more 'designed for sweet spot' wattage. I think the fairer comparison is between the 3.5W ULV part and the Core 2 Solo @ 1067MHz. It would definitely be *very* interesting to compare the two.

I agree that Isaiah's advantage in terms of perf/watt may not be as much as VIA would like to imply that it is, however.
 
Phenom could probably shave off a number of watts if it were undervolted and underclocked to the same neighborhood.

Without its circuits and process tailored to that lower clock range, though, it might prove leakier.
I wonder what Griffin could do if pared down to one core.

Although with Griffin, Via is in the odd position of being superior in FP, since it has improved SSE support.
 
if you want a single core AMD why not look at the Sempron LE-1100 (65nm, 1.9GHz, 256K L2, dirt cheap). I've been wondering how does a mini-ITX with C7 compares to a µATX mobo with VIA IGP (or MCP78, or AMD) and Sempron. Looking for a review giving consumption, perf per dollar, perf per watt of the whole system, also ideally that review would look at hitachi P7K500 250GB vs other hard drives vs laptop hard drives to get the full picture.
imo the future of computing is low end and low power :)


The article gives a clue on underclocked sempron power usage :

# Isaiah Embedded: Unknown TDP (5-25W?) and will compete against AMD’s 65nm Sempron @ 8W running at 1GHz and Intel’s diverse embedded solutions.
 
I've been wondering how does a mini-ITX with C7 compares to a µATX mobo with VIA IGP (or MCP78, or AMD) and Sempron.

Everest Ultimate has some C7 scores in its benchmarks. It looks similar to a P3 Tualatin or P4 Willamette (RDRAM) for integer tasks per clock fairly often, unless you use its AES unit and then it's faster than a quad core lol. But its AES unit is obviously for special apps. FPU is not hot.
 
thanks. though, it's the power usage I was wondering about (with sempron at stock speed, at 1GHz, or overclocked)

My HTPC is

Sempron 3200+ 90nm, undervolted to 0.875V/1.050V at stock clocks
NVIDIA 7050/630a-based motherboard
3 DIMMs
2.5" laptop drive
PicoPSU

Idles at 21W (CnQ), runs at ~36W under load (1.8GHz). This is without the TV cards, adding those bumps the numbers by ~10W.

Using a 65nm Sempron might shave off a watt or two, but probably not much more than that I'm guessing. Breaking the 20W barrier with uATX is quite a challenge I think.
 
This is a pretty interesting announcment, puts VIA out of the "it's fast enough to just barely work range" and into the "it's good enough range."
Can they compare in price though? Perhaps for ultra small systems, I suppose, but I doubt they have the production capability to compete with the Celeron and Sempron lines for standard laptops and desktops.
 
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