There are two major computer processor producers in the world and they have most of the market. In a far, far away past, a number a smaller producers like Cyrix and VIA were challenging AMD and Intel on the processor market, but to no avail. Cyrix was going good in the first half of the 90s but later it sunk so low that VIA was able to buy the whole company for petty cash. So only VIA remained, but it refocused on computer chipsets and low end integrated video chips, all but in name pulling from the processor market. Its current computer processor, named C7, is not too hot either, as it is a low cost, low power solution designed more for embedded systems and less for desktops or mobile computer systems.

Now after several years of no new cores and intensive chipset engineering, VIA plans to launch a new processor core, named Isaiah, in the first months of the 2008. Isaiah will use a newer architecture and it is scheduled to enter "engineering validation test" just at the end of 2007, according to sources.
The Isaiah core, using the CN codename, is designed to replace the older C7 - which was built in 2004 - with the VIA Esther processor architecture. Unlike most processors from VIA, Isaiah will not be a truly low end, low cost, low power, low "just about everything" CPU. For starters, it will be produced with the 64-bit technology and until now, there is no hard evidence of a 32-bit version. The production will use the smaller form factor of 65 nanometer process, VIA finally getting over the 90 nanometer process used for the Esther processor architecture.

Isaiah's main features will include a V4 Bus type frontside bus with a nominal frequency of 1333MHz, a big increase over the 800MHz frequency used now, the level 2 of cache will receive a boost too, as it will have 1MB of memory (current L2 cache for Esther processors is 124KB) and most importantly, integrated support for ECC (error checking and correction) memory modules and virtualization technology. From the hardware specifications of the Isaiah processor architecture, it looks like VIA is hoping to get a grip on some market shares, even if they are only for the lower cost desktop or mobile segments.

The core frequency of the Isaiah core will not be much higher than the Esther architecture one and while the power consumption is much higher, so is its performance. Isaiah was designed to double the performance ratings of the Esther processors, with a floating point unit performance four times greater, according to its maker cited by the news site Digitimes.