14 DAY TRIAL // Chipset manufacturer VIA has lost much of its old-times shine. In fact, we cannot even call it a "chipset manufacturer", since the company announced that it will phase out its chipset business and will focus on its own processor products and their matching chipsets. At the moment, the company produces its own CPUs as well as small-form factor motherboards for miniature systems.
The company has announced that it will start producing processors designed on a new architecture. These chips will be based on the "Isaiah" production technology and are expected to double the performance of the current VIA offerings, while preserving the same thermal envelope. The new processors will be dual-core and will run at core clocks of 2 GHz.
Although the Isaiah architecture has been announced back in 2004, VIA failed to release further specifications. If everything goes as scheduled, the chips will become available starting the second quarter of the year. VIA is only a small chip manufacturer, but it has managed to achieve quite a few design awards during the time. Top-tier hardware vendors such as HP, Samsung and OQO used VIA products in their personal computer lines or even inside their handheld devices.
The new Isaiah processor will be the company's first one to support some essential features, such as processing instructions out of order, just like Intel's and AMD's chips. The current VIA processors are capable only of in-order execution to keep the power consumption levels at a minimum.
"With out-of-order execution, you can do things while waiting. The bad news is that you execute things that later get thrown away and hence consume more power than necessary," said Glenn Henry, president of Centaur Technology, which is Via's processor design subsidiary.
Another important step for VIA's chips will be the ability of running 64-bit software, a feature that is extremely common among Intel and AMD chips since 2003. This will allow the company to align to the modern operating systems' standards.