Our friends over at Hot Hardware have just posted up a great interview with Glenn Henry, VIAs Centaur design center president. They've got the entire transcript up as well as an audio version for those of you interested in listening to this post on your iPod. Here's a choice quote from the interview as to how VIA's new CPU architecture is going to lineup with Intel's forthcoming mobile CPU, Silverthorne:

Q: You've stated that Isaiah based processors are likely to outperform Intel's upcoming Silverthorne processor. What is it about Isaiah that gives it this perceived advantage? Is there a higher IPC capability in the design versus Intel's architecture? What fundamental blocks of the chip offer you a competitive advantage, in your opinion.

Glenn Henry: Had I known that I would have gotten so much publicity for that statement, I may not have said it BUT, in a nutshell, we suspect Intel's Silverthorne is an in-order processor (instruction fetch, operand dispatch, execution, and then function unit/result write). Isaiah is an out-of-order processor and out of order processors are just, faster. Isaiah is capable of three X86 instructions per clock and can execute up to 7 micro-instructions per clock with our superscalar architecture. They'll (Intel) likely only be able to do 1 or 2 X86 instructions per clock. We also think our 1MB L2 Cache and dual 64K L1 caches going to be larger than theirs but we can't confirm this officially obviously. So the big bullets are; out of order execution, a wider three-issue superscalar architecture and likely larger caches versus the other guy's (Intel's) chip – at least from what we think we know of their product at this point in time.

Comparisons aside, the key thing you should take away from this interiew is that the new chips based on the Isaiah architecture are pin compatible with C7 which means that any UMPC design based on the C7-M, like the Everex CloudBook, OQO model 02, Wibrain B1, etc. can all be upgraded by the manufacturers to use the new CPU with double the performance with very little effort. This is a huge deal for existing UMPC designs and for forthcoming designs in that they can get a huge performance boost without radical alterations.

Visitor

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

Why are people comparing Isaiah and Silverthorne? The former has an announced 20W TDP. The latter is supposed to have, at most, a 2W TDP. It's unlikely that they will compete directly against each other.

Visitor

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

Is there an ULV version of Isaiah coming out in the near future that can be used on UMPCs?