VIA announces Isaiah, its 64bit processor architecture

[HEXUS]

Though Intel and AMD won't quite be shaking in their boots just yet, VIA's new line of 64-bit Isaiah processors could be ideal for small portable devices.

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[Kamakazie]

One of these plus a HD3450 for the ultimate low power, fully functional, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray capable media centre? I hope that will be the case. Been interested in the C-7 for a MCPC but seemed a bit too slow for my liking. This should be that bit faster and with the 3250 hopefully providing full vc-1 and h.264 decoding it could be a great, silent solution.

[chrestomanci]

This sounds very interesting.

No where in the press release does it say that this new CPU actually runs the AMD64 instruction set (that modern Intel CPUs also support). If it is some other instruction set then all kinds of exciting features and great power efficiency are possible, but without windows. But I digress.

The winTurbo™ dual-PLL implementation with the possibility to change clock speed in a single clock cycle is very interesting, as most other CPUs take several milliseconds to change clock speed (millions of cycles). My old Linux box had an AMD cpu that could switch from 800MHz to 2GHz fairly quickly, and with the cpufreq support in the Linux kernel it could change speed in response to load quite fast. This resulted in a computer that felt as responsive as a 2GHz box, but only consumed the power of an 800MHz one. If you looked at a graph of CPU speed it showed most of the time spend at low speed with the occasional 'Turbo' spike. The new VIA implementation is much better. If there was support for it in the OS scheduler, then the CPU could change speed hundreds of times per second, and give CPU limited tasks maximum clock cycles, while saving cycles and power consumption for I/O bound tasks, and dropping the clock back to minimum anytime the system is idle. (eg the pause between each user keystroke).

I am not to keen on the new security features, as they sound like an implementation of Next-Generation Secure Computing Base. With it Microsoft could create an OS with totally airtight security (as in cutting of the air supply of anyone else), and make it so that you no longer control your computer, and it is effectively no longer your own.

[Funkstar]

VIA have had more advanced security features than most systems for a while. I think thi is because the embeded market is important to them, and this will be a good feature for those markets.