May 15, 2008 6:15 PM PDT

End of Intel, AMD duopoly near? Via readies Isaiah chip

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9945568-7.html

Is the end of the Intel-AMD duopoly nigh? Via Technologies is hoping this may be the case when it announces the "Isaiah" processor later this month.

Via Isaiah processor is targeted at mainstream notebooks and desktops; top: Isaiah processor; bottom: $398 15-inch Everex gBook

(Credit: Via, Wal-Mart)

The company's first high-performance x86 chip will be targeted at the mainstream PC market--another first for the Taipei-based chip supplier. Via processors have historically appeared in ultrasmall mobile devices (such as the OQO), embedded computers, or thin-client computers.

"It puts us into the mainstream market for the first time," said Richard Brown, vice president, corporate marketing at Via.

Isaiah, like Via processors before it, will still hew to the lower-power line, however. Isaiah (a code name) will consume no more than 3.5 watts, while Intel's Atom processor ranges from 0.6 to 2.5 watts. Atom, however, uses a more simple "in-order execution" design compared to Isaiah's Superscalar, out-of-order design capable of decoding three full x86 instructions per clock cycle of the processor.

Because of this design, Isaiah may deliver higher performance than Atom, though independent benchmarking will be the final judge.

Via subsidiary Centaur Technology designed the processor. "Centaur has been working on this for the last three years. It's between two and four times the performance of C7 (Via's current processor). So, it' very, very close to (Intel's) Core 2. Core 2 solo (single core)," Brown said.

The Via C7 processor is currently being used in a design that may herald more Isaiah-based mainstream notebooks. The $398 Everex gBook is being sold at Wal-Mart with a 15-inch screen, a 1.5GHz Via C-7M processor, 512MB of DDR2 system memory, a 60 GB hard disk drive, optical drive, Ethernet, and wireless. It uses the gOS Version 2 operating system, a Linux distribution.

"We're in full agreement with the optimized PC concept," Brown said. An idea put forward by Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, it postulates that a consumer will get better PC price-performance by adding a $50 graphics card rather than a two or three hundred dollar quad-core processor. "You can have a processor like Isaiah matched with a better graphics card," Brown said. "There's opportunity in both desktops and notebooks."

Last month, Via and Nvidia announced a platform billed as the "The World's Most Affordable Vista Premium PC," the sub-$45 processing platform will combine Via's Isaiah processor with an integrated Nvidia graphics chipset.

Originally posted at Nanotech: The Circuits Blog

Brooke Crothers is a former editor-at-large at CNET News.com, has been an editor for The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and has been an analyst at IDC. He writes for the CNET Blog Network, and is not a current employee of CNET. Contact him at brooke_crothers@msn.com. Disclosure.