Topic: VIA Isaiah Processor Architecture Preview

[Nemesis]

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VIA has done a good job cutting a niche out for themselves in the low power/low heat market, and while their products do not lead the world in performance, they certainly are still some of the most power efficient for many applications.  When then engineers at Centaur were directed to create a new architecture, power consumption was always the first goal.  Performance does take a back seat, but not nearly as much as one would think.  VIA knew that if they were to compete against Intel and AMD, as they are migrating to a new process node, they had to improve their performance to keep their products competitive.

Isaiah is being produced on a bulk 65 nm process, though VIA is not releasing who is doing the fabrication.  The previous C7 was produced by IBM on their 90 nm SOI process.  This time Centaur decided to forgo SOI and work with a cheaper bulk process (though nearly any 65 nm process has plenty of power and speed optimizations over previous 90 nm nodes).  When considering die size, the people at VIA are not talking official numbers as of yet, but most likely Isaiah uses around the same amount of space as the older C7 cores.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of this architecture is the transistor count.  Each chip is approximately 94 million transistors, and quite a bit of that is taken up by the 1 MB L2 cache.  Compare this with the AMD Phenom which features 450 million transistors.  Though that is a four core part with 2 MB of L3 cache, we see that the Isaiah is still less than 1/4th the size.

VIA will not pursue dual core products at this time, but the Isaiah architecture can handle more than one core.  Supposedly much of the internal infrastructure needed to create a dual core product is present, and just waiting for the right economic and processing conditions to design a product around.

The overall performance of the chip has not been discussed, as it is still undergoing a lot of testing and tuning.  VIA does expect it to be 2 to 4 times faster than the C7 at the same clockspeed, and be able to pull about the same power.  This will be a tremendous boost for those working with the lower power/small form factor designs.

If they can keep the power down and performance up it sounds like a good chip for laptops and other low power quiet systems.  We will have to wait and see the final result however.  It might be good for those $200 PCs Walmart has been shipping.