VIA announces Isaiah CPU, and it might actually be good

Posted at: 11:33am 25th January 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

New x86 CPU has 'world's fastest floating point,' and can apparently play Crysis too

If you ever had the misfortune to pay for your tight fisted ways by buying a Cyrix processor in the 1990s, then you'll know that floating-point calculations weren't Cyrix's strong point. In fact, floating point calculations have still been a problem for VIA's CPUs after the company bought Cyrix from National Semiconductor, which is why you will never find an EPIA gaming system. As such, it may come as a massive surprise to find that VIA is claiming that its latest CPU architecture has the 'world's fastest floating point.'

Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology Inc, a subsidiary of VIA, proudly boasted that 'with a team of less than one hundred first-class engineers, we have created from scratch the world's most power-efficient x86 processor architecture with state of the art features, outstanding performance, and flexible scalability for the future.'

VIA has apparently decided to abandon its old CPU architecture, and design a new one with an 'ultra modern 64-bit superscalar, speculative, out-of-order microarchitecture' from scratch. The result is the biblically named Isaiah, which VIA says offers up to four times the power of its predecessor, the C7, while consuming the same amount of power.

It's about time, of course. Back in the 1990s, Cyrix used to justify the floating-point problems by saying that hardly any software used a floating point processor, but that hasn't been the case for some time now. VIA says that it's also improved the pre-fetching and branch prediction in the CPU over its predecessors, and that the architecture features a full 64-bit instruction set. As well as this, the CPU will also have two 64KB Level 1 cache units (one for data and one for instruction), along with 1MB of Level 2 cache.

Unlike AMD and Intel, VIA still hasn't decided to jump on to the multi-core bandwagon, and Isaiah is currently only a single core architecture. As such, VIA isn't pitching it at high-end desktops, but reckons it could be used for media centre PCs and PVRs, particularly with the CPU's incredibly low TDP of just 20W, which means it won't require much in the way of cooling. As well as this, it also looks like you can use it to play games. US tech site HardOCP has had a chance to play Crysis using the CPU, and says that it was 'more than up to the task.'

At launch, the 65nm CPU will be clocked at just 1GHz with an 800MHz FSB and SSE3 support, but VIA has plans to take this up to 2GHz with a 1,333MHz FSB and SSE4 support in the future.

Interestingly, VIA is also claiming to be making advances in the miniature motherboards market, with a new diminutive Mobile-ITX board planned. The board will measure just 7.5cm x 4.5cm, and is scheduled for launch in the next couple of years.