Monday, July 7th 2014
VIA Readying New 64-bit x86 Processor to Take on Intel Bay Trail and AMD Kabini
Only the third active licencee of Intel's x86 machine architecture, VIA Technology, is readying its first x86 processor in years, codenamed Isaiah II. This chip is based on a brand new 64-bit x86 core design by VIA and the engineering team it acquired from Centaur Technology, another erstwhile x86 licencee, and features modern instruction sets such as AVX 2.0. VIA began sampling a quad-core processor based on Isaiah II, which was put to live test by the company, at its InfoComm 2014 booth. It was compared to Intel's "Bay Trail" Atom and AMD's "Kabini" Athlon chips. It turns out that the Isaiah II is pretty good, if it comes out soon enough.
The Isaiah II based quad-core chip, featuring 2.00 GHz clock speeds, and 2 MB of L2 cache, was put through SANDRA. The BGA chip was running on a VIA-made motherboard, with its own VIA VX11H chipset. It was compared to AMD Athlon 5350 (quad-core "Jaguar" with 2.05 GHz clocks), and Intel Atom Z3770 (quad-core "Silvermont" with 2.40 GHz clocks). The results are tabulated below. At 2.00 GHz, armed with the latest multimedia and cryptography instruction-sets, VIA's chip is faster than Intel's in most tests, despite lower clocks. It trades blows - and wins - against AMD's chip, in most tests. VIA is expected to launch the first chips based on Isaiah II in late-August, 2014. VIA is hedging its bets with efficient compact PCs, kiosks, and digital signage, with its new chip.
Sources:
3DCenter.org, ExtraHardware.cz
The Isaiah II based quad-core chip, featuring 2.00 GHz clock speeds, and 2 MB of L2 cache, was put through SANDRA. The BGA chip was running on a VIA-made motherboard, with its own VIA VX11H chipset. It was compared to AMD Athlon 5350 (quad-core "Jaguar" with 2.05 GHz clocks), and Intel Atom Z3770 (quad-core "Silvermont" with 2.40 GHz clocks). The results are tabulated below. At 2.00 GHz, armed with the latest multimedia and cryptography instruction-sets, VIA's chip is faster than Intel's in most tests, despite lower clocks. It trades blows - and wins - against AMD's chip, in most tests. VIA is expected to launch the first chips based on Isaiah II in late-August, 2014. VIA is hedging its bets with efficient compact PCs, kiosks, and digital signage, with its new chip.
24 Comments on VIA Readying New 64-bit x86 Processor to Take on Intel Bay Trail and AMD Kabini
There's hope for more nano/picoITX boards! :)
iII 2.00 A5350 2.05 Z3770 2.40 hummm the Atom is the highest clocked and the lowest ranked duh...
intel should dump the Atom for anything else than tablet smartphones and padphones... imho
now we have to see 1. price 2. tdp 3. upgrade ability (ie:BGA vs Fs1b)
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I imagine seeing this in Lenovo IdeaCentre budget systems and things like the Acer Revo, those tiny PC's that clip onto the back of a monitor. Similar to what the Atom's were used for.
Nano is a capable little core but didn't compete very well at high frequencies in terms of TDP in part due to the 40nm process. Also, traditionally, the VIA southbridge-integrated GPUs ("Chrome") have been rubbish, but the CPU core might continue to do well in nettops and perhaps even carve a bit out of the microserver market (AFAIR Dell tried it before with VIA chips in what I think was codenamed Fortuna).
oh you thought i was talking about Silvermont Z3770 for those device well 28nm is standard and 40nm can still be found in Smartphones tablet and padphones.
my Razr i has a Z2480 (32nm) and it's a pretty damn good Soc (mind you single X86 core HT 2.0ghz and scoring like a 4 A9 core Exynos 4412 stock, and up to 3 days 14 hrs battery time, yet on heavy use it does 1d-1d21hrs) yet Atom for anything else is ... meh ... not even on the small toe of a Isaiah II so let alone a Kabini APU
well maybe server Atom 16core ... iirc i saw a news about theses, but if they need 16core to get ahead of those 2 4core.... again ... meh...
seems on low power SOC any other than Intel has it good...well yeah and also add some graphical bench to do a good comparison (/sarcasm), the Athlon 5350 would be way more ahead (what's a SOC if it has a crappy GPU even if it does 10-15w less ) let say the main force of Kabini is to be a APU with a good IGP (excepted for the higher tdp tho)do that with a Kabini Fs1b platform and you have a similar setup, but without a soldered CPU.
VIA like go nowhere
from the paper, the performance looks good and i hope they could offer alternative than intel or AMD
I expect poor power consumption characteristics given the separate graphics chip etc.
Keep it up, VIA