VIA Technologies unveiled yesterday the VIA “Isaiah” x86 processor architecture, designed for use in laptops, UMPCs, and desktop computers.
According to the company, the VIA Isaiah Architecture combines “all the latest advances in x86 processor technology, including a 64-bit superscalar speculative out-of-order microarchitecture, high-performance multimedia computation, and a new virtual machine architecture”.
The first generation of Isaiah products, which are based on 65-nanometer production technology, will be pin-compatible with the VIA C7 processor family. The initial Isaiah CPUs have clock speeds of up to 2GHz and 1MB of L2 cache, while the front side bus is scalable from 800MHz up to 1333MHz.
“For further enhanced multimedia performance, the VIA Isaiah Architecture also integrates the world’s fastest x86 processor Floating Point Unit (FPU) with the ability to execute four floating point adds and four multiplies per clock and also featuring a new algorithm that minimizes latency. Support for new SSE instructions and a 128-bit wide integer data path further boost multimedia performance,” the press release says.
VIA has also implemented new techniques to reduce power consumption and heat.
The Isaiah-based processors are expected to start shipping in the first half of 2008.