Via to Release More Details on the Upcoming Isaiah Architecture

Via has announced its new processor architecture a few days ago, but more details are to come until the upcoming International Solid State Circuits Conference. Of course, Via will take part at the event, along with industry giants such as Intel, Sun and IBM.

It seems that the upcoming Isaiah chip will support out-of-order processing, unlike its previous processors that could only perform in-order tasks. When the in-order processor needs a result or a value to be passed to in order to complete a task, all the queued tasks stop until it retrieves that value. The out of order processors would wait for the value, but at the same time, will continue processing the queued tasks.

The new Via chips will power home media centers, ultra-thin/light notebooks and ultra-mobile PCs, as they are alleged to deliver the best performance-per-watt on the market. The chip has been rebuilt from ground up using the 65-nanometer manufacturing node and comes with a 64-bit micro-architecture to support the modern operating systems and virtualization.

"With fewer than 100 first-class engineers we have created the world's most power-efficient x86 processor architecture with state-of-the-art features, outstanding performance and flexible scalability," said Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology.

The first Isaiah processors will preserve the pin-to-pin compatibility with the previous chips manufactured by Via in the C7 family. This should facilitate the upgrade process, especially for the system builders. The C7 CPUs were used in products that demanded low heat levels and low power requirements, such as telephony and telecommunications applications.

"The introduction of the Isaiah is an extremely significant milestone in Via's processor business," said Wenchi Chen, president and chief executive at Via. "In achieving these new levels of functionality and performance, Isaiah provides the ideal complement to our industry-leading family of low power Via C7 processors and will enable us to extend our presence in the global x86 processor market."

The first Isaiah processors are expected to arrive soon, during the first half of 2008.