14 DAY TRIAL // Coming to complete the trio of companies with new CPUs on hand, VIA Technologies has issued a press release in which it presents the dual-core Nano X2 energy-efficient processor.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have, as end-users probably know, already released their respective Sandy Bridge and Fusion processors.
As one would expect, laptop and desktop makers have already announced a slew of systems based on them and will no doubt keep at it until and throughout CES 2011.
Now, VIA technologies decided it was time to make its own move, so it unleashed a new processor of its own.
The chip in question is known as VIA Nano X2 and is made up of two out-of-order x86 cores.
Basically, this is the chip that VIA hopes will let it put up a fight on the desktop and laptop fronts, relying, for the most part, on energy efficiency as the prime asset.
The X2 uses two VIA Isaiah cores and boasts native 64-bit support, plus on-die AES encryption and random number generation.
The frequency of the cores themselves is 800 MHz, not a number on par with what Intel and AMD have but a drawback supposedly compensated by “up to double the performance on multi-thread optimized applications” over previous-generation VIA Nano chips.
Other specifications include SSE4, VT CPU virtalization, the VIA PadLock hardware security technology and pin-to-pin compatibility with previous VIA Nano, VIA C7, VIA C7-M and VIA Eden processors (for easy upgrade).
“The VIA Nano X2 processor arrives at a time when software architectures are now optimized to for multi-thread computing,” commented Richard Brown, VP International Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc.
“Improvements in semi-conductor fabrication means we can now double the number of processor cores while maintaining the same low energy consumption levels that our customers are used to,” he added.
Samples are already circulating and systems are said to be bound for release this very quarter (Q1, 2011).