# VIA Readying New 64-bit x86 Processor to Take on Intel Bay Trail and AMD Kabini



## btarunr (Jul 7, 2014)

Only the third active licencee of Intel's x86 machine architecture, VIA Technology, is readying its first x86 processor in years, codenamed Isaiah II. This chip is based on a brand new 64-bit x86 core design by VIA and the engineering team it acquired from Centaur Technology, another erstwhile x86 licencee, and features modern instruction sets such as AVX 2.0. VIA began sampling a quad-core processor based on Isaiah II, which was put to live test by the company, at its InfoComm 2014 booth. It was compared to Intel's "Bay Trail" Atom and AMD's "Kabini" Athlon chips. It turns out that the Isaiah II is pretty good, if it comes out soon enough.

The Isaiah II based quad-core chip, featuring 2.00 GHz clock speeds, and 2 MB of L2 cache, was put through SANDRA. The BGA chip was running on a VIA-made motherboard, with its own VIA VX11H chipset. It was compared to AMD Athlon 5350 (quad-core "Jaguar" with 2.05 GHz clocks), and Intel Atom Z3770 (quad-core "Silvermont" with 2.40 GHz clocks). The results are tabulated below. At 2.00 GHz, armed with the latest multimedia and cryptography instruction-sets, VIA's chip is faster than Intel's in most tests, despite lower clocks. It trades blows - and wins - against AMD's chip, in most tests. VIA is expected to launch the first chips based on Isaiah II in late-August, 2014. VIA is hedging its bets with efficient compact PCs, kiosks, and digital signage, with its new chip.





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## Frick (Jul 7, 2014)

Holy shiet, this I did not expect. Great to see though, I really REALLY hope they get somewher with it.

There's hope for more nano/picoITX boards!


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## Ferrum Master (Jul 7, 2014)

the more the merrier


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## john_ (Jul 7, 2014)

I hope they have better luck compared to what they did with ARM SoCs under the Wondermedia brand.


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## GreiverBlade (Jul 7, 2014)

Ferrum Master said:


> the more the merrier


indeed, tho it should be Intel to worry about it, as far as i see the Kabini do well against the Isaiah II unless the pricing will show a huge difference. (oh lower clock hummmm well GOOD JOB VIA! wait a sec ... 0.05ghz hum minimized reckoning)
iII 2.00 A5350 2.05 Z3770 2.40 hummm the Atom is the highest clocked and the lowest ranked duh... 
intel should dump the Atom for anything else than tablet smartphones and padphones... imho

now we have to see 1. price 2. tdp 3. upgrade ability (ie:BGA vs Fs1b)


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## Ferrum Master (Jul 7, 2014)

GreiverBlade said:


> tablet smartphones and padphones... imho)



Well I am afraid this lil critter is still 40nm silicon...


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## bencrutz (Jul 7, 2014)

they're still around?


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## john_ (Jul 7, 2014)

Ferrum Master said:


> Well I am afraid this lil critter is still 40nm silicon...


28nm
http://translate.google.com/transla...uncht-moeglicherweise-am-31-august&edit-text=


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## Popocatepetl (Jul 7, 2014)

The results are meaningless without the power consumption figures - a ULV Haswell will trash any of these chips at the expense of more heat generated and more power (battery) used.


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## revanchrist (Jul 7, 2014)

GreiverBlade said:


> indeed, tho it should be Intel to worry about it, as far as i see the Kabini do well against the Isaiah II unless the pricing will show a huge difference. (oh lower clock hummmm well GOOD JOB VIA! wait a sec ... 0.05ghz hum minimized reckoning)
> iII 2.00 A5350 2.05 Z3770 2.40 hummm the Atom is the highest clocked and the lowest ranked duh...
> intel should dump the Atom for anything else than tablet smartphones and padphones... imho
> 
> now we have to see 1. price 2. tdp 3. upgrade ability (ie:BGA vs Fs1b)



The comparison isn't quite fair tbh. AM1 5350 is a desktop CPU (25W TDP). Z3770 is a mobile SoC CPU which is only a few watts TDP or SDP. They should put in Bay Trail D (Desktop) J2900 (10W TDP) SoC into the comparison. Now i'm not sure if Isaiah II is a desktop or a mobile chip and god knows how much is it's TDP. Original Isaiah has a TDP of 5-25W.


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## RCoon (Jul 7, 2014)

revanchrist said:


> Now i'm not sure if Isaiah II is a desktop or a mobile chip.



It's designed for Net Top/AIO PC's and digital signage.

I imagine seeing this in Lenovo IdeaCentre budget systems and things like the Acer Revo, those tiny PC's that clip onto the back of a monitor. Similar to what the Atom's were used for.


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## thevoiceofreason (Jul 7, 2014)

RCoon said:


> It's designed for Net Top/AIO PC's and digital signage.
> 
> I imagine seeing this in Lenovo IdeaCentre budget systems and things like the Acer Revo, those tiny PC's that clip onto the back of a monitor. Similar to what the Atom's were used for.


VIA Nano (and before that C7/C5) have also been used for many years in HP thin client range, following the acquisition of Neoware in 2007. Wyse has also used them extensively (acquired by Dell in 2012).

Nano is a capable little core but didn't compete very well at high frequencies in terms of TDP in part due to the 40nm process. Also, traditionally, the VIA southbridge-integrated GPUs ("Chrome") have been rubbish, but the CPU core might continue to do well in nettops and perhaps even carve a bit out of the microserver market (AFAIR Dell tried it before with VIA chips in what I think was codenamed Fortuna).


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## GreiverBlade (Jul 7, 2014)

Ferrum Master said:


> Well I am afraid this lil critter is still 40nm silicon...


i am talking about limiting the Atom Soc for those device ...
oh you thought i was talking about Silvermont Z3770 for those device well 28nm is standard and 40nm can still be found in Smartphones tablet and padphones.

my Razr i has a Z2480 (32nm) and it's a pretty damn good Soc (mind you single X86 core HT 2.0ghz and scoring like a 4 A9 core Exynos 4412 stock, and up to 3 days 14 hrs battery time, yet on heavy use it does 1d-1d21hrs) yet Atom for anything else is ... meh ... not even on the small toe of a Isaiah II so let alone a Kabini APU

well maybe server Atom 16core ... iirc i saw a news about theses, but if they need 16core to get ahead of those 2 4core.... again ... meh...

seems on low power SOC any other than Intel has it good...



revanchrist said:


> They should put in Bay Trail D (Desktop) J2900 (10W TDP) SoC.


well yeah and also add some graphical bench to do a good comparison (/sarcasm), the Athlon 5350 would be way more ahead  (what's a SOC if it has a crappy GPU even if it does 10-15w less ) let say the main force of Kabini is to be a APU with a good IGP (excepted for the higher tdp tho)



thevoiceofreason said:


> VIA Nano (and before that C7/C5) have also been used for many years in HP thin client range, following the acquisition of Neoware in 2007. Wyse has also used them extensively (acquired by Dell in 2012).
> 
> Nano is a capable little core but didn't compete very well at high frequencies in terms of TDP in part due to the 40nm process. Also, traditionally, the VIA southbridge-integrated GPUs ("Chrome") have been rubbish, but the CPU core might continue to do well in nettops and perhaps even carve a bit out of the microserver market (AFAIR Dell tried it before with VIA chips in what I think was codenamed Fortuna).


do that with a Kabini Fs1b platform and you have a similar setup, but without a soldered CPU.


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## micropage7 (Jul 7, 2014)

wow, it been a while
VIA like go nowhere
from the paper, the performance looks good and i hope they could offer alternative than intel or AMD


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## Patriot (Jul 7, 2014)

All AMD has to do is put dual channel memory controller on those SOC's and they will dominate.


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## esrever (Jul 7, 2014)

VIA will never get anywhere in this market now that everything has to be a soc and have a integrated GPU. There is just no way they can compete in those areas.


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## MikeMurphy (Jul 7, 2014)

VIA produces all sorts of neat products.  Unfortunately, they never make it to retail channels at compelling prices.

I expect poor power consumption characteristics given the separate graphics chip etc.


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## TRWOV (Jul 7, 2014)

wow, talk about a comeback (sort of). I used a C3 for a while, not a bad chip but memory bandwidth was awful, IIRC.


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## john_ (Jul 7, 2014)

VIA could never make a good memory controller. Always slower than anything on the market. Even SiS was better in that area(I think).


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## kmisterk (Jul 8, 2014)

Sweet! I hope they take it further. I'd love to finally have an option aside from AMD and Intel in the higher-end processor world. 

Keep it up, VIA


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## TRWOV (Jul 8, 2014)

^Not gonna happen, VIA has entrenched itself into the embedded market and it seems to work for them.


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## kmisterk (Jul 8, 2014)

TRWOV said:


> ^Not gonna happen, VIA has entrenched itself into the embedded market and it seems to work for them.



Ah, well one can hope.


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## HalfAHertz (Jul 8, 2014)

They do not have the supply chain to complete effectively. They've been out of the game for to long.


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## Mussels (Jul 8, 2014)

if power consumption is low enough, they could really jump into the x86 android and windows 8.1 tablet market.


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## Patriot (Jul 8, 2014)

Mussels said:


> if power consumption is low enough, they could really jump into the x86 android and windows 8.1 tablet market.


That would require a decent igpu...  Which they have not.


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