VIA Isaiah

Some of you may know that I've always had a soft spot in my heart for VIA, a chipset, motherboard, and processor manufacturer. Their puny video cards notwithstanding, they have a knack for getting the best performance per watt ratio in the industry. Recently, while I was researching yet again their C7 processor with hopes of putting it in the computer I'm planning to build, I noticed a press release for the Isaiah core. I took a look at it, and was amazed.

First off, it's been totally rewritten from scratch. That's a very UNIX-y philosophy, which rather impresses me as Intel and AMD have, as of yet, refused to do this. As a result, they claim that it's cleaner and more elegant in design. What they say about it would seem to back that view up.

It's their first 64-bit processor, for one thing, allegedly with a more complete and reliable implementation of the AMD64 instruction set. They also implemented more SSE instructions, and switched to a 65nm manufacturing process. But I'm just beating around the bush here. VIA alleges that it's 2 to 4 times faster then the C7 with the same power usage and price. They also claim that it has the fastest FPU of any x86 CPU, which wouldn't shock me as it can handle 4 floating point additions and 4 subtractions per clock cycle.

But get this: it can automatically overclock itself when it's running cool, and you can manually set a desired temperature that it will attempt to reach.

If all this is true, then I might just have a new favorite processor manufacturer. I can't wait until it comes out this year to play with it.