VIA Nano ready to compete with AMD Puma and Intel Atom

Posted by admin

May 30, 2008

Power saving ULV CPU’s or are one of the major requirement of the notebook as well as desktop world. The race is amongst many competitors as Intel has already launched Atom and AMD Puma is yet to release next month. And now VIA is also ready with its low power chip named Nano. The chip is Core named Isaiah based architecture. The Nano series chip is pin-compatible with VIA C7 series and are 65nm based. VIA says that these 65nm chips performs 4 times more than current generation VIA processors.

Isaiah Core is an x86 64-bit, superscalar, speculative out-of-order architecture and is actually VIA’s first real mainstream desktop processor. The Nano processors will be made by Fujitsu using its 65nm process and the whole nanoBGA2 package measures 441mm². Each Nano processor comes with 1MB L2 cache and the first models L and U series are shown in the table below:

Nano series consists of 5 low power processors with TDP from 5W up to 25W and at idle state 100mW.

There is a number of features VIA highlights in its press release:

64-bit Superscalar Speculative Out-Of-Order MicroArchitecture: Supports a full 64-bit instruction set and provides for macro-fusion and micro-fusion functionality, and sophisticated branch prediction for greater processor efficiency and performance.

High-Performance Computation and Media Processing: The high-speed, low power VIA V4 Front Side Bus starting at 800MHz, plus a high floating point unit, support for new SSE instructions, and two 64KB L1 caches and 1MB exclusive L2 cache with 16-way associativity gives a big boost to multimedia performance.

Advanced Power and Thermal Management: Aggressive management of active power includes support for the new “C6″ power state, Adaptive PowerSaver™ Technology, new circuit techniques and mechanisms for managing the die temperature, reducing power draw and improving thermal management.

Scalable Upgrade to VIA C7™ Processor: Pin-to-pin compatibility with current VIA C7 processors enables a smooth transition for OEMs and mainboard vendors, enabling them to offer a wider range of products for different markets with a single board or system design.

Greener Technology: In addition to full compliance with RoHS and WEEE regulations, product manufacturing will be halogen-free and lead-free at launch, helping to promote a cleaner environment and more sustainable computing.

Enhanced VIA PadLock™ Security Engine: Industry-leading on-die hardware cryptographic acceleration and security features, including dual quantum random number generators, an AES Encryption Engine, NX-bit, and SHA-1 and SHA-256 hashing.

Nano’s strength is of course its performance per watt ratio, more than its raw computing power. Even though it features a number of things not even available with competing processors.

Nano will be available in Q3 of 2008. There is no price specification available but as it is expecting to compete Atom and Puma, it should have considerate price.

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