“VIA is beginning to ramp up production on the successors to their C3 part, the C7 and C7-M CPU’s. Keith Kowal, marketing manager for VIA’s chipset platform group, took some time on his promotional tour to talk with us about the new platform.”
“VIA is beginning to ramp up production on the successors to their C3 part, the C7 and C7-M CPU’s. Keith Kowal, marketing manager for VIA’s chipset platform group, took some time on his promotional tour to talk with us about the new platform.”
how about any specific instructioin sets support?
My home server runs on a WinChip C3 (at 600Mhz) – handles my needs quite nicely. Glad to hear they’re continuing the line.
I heard some horror stories about their previous products … but they seem to be doing nicely despite (or more likely, because of) the recent competition.
Nice low power line of CPU’s for general purpose. Still plagued by very feeble floating point, and somewhat anemic overall performance. Not for gaming or enterprise servers! Great for uses that require passive cooling, these chips run quite cool.
the instruction set is probably identical to a P5, but with high level routine calls for all the encryption stuff. Don’t expect X86-64 for a bit 😎
Quite the opposite – there are multipliers and other hardware dedicated to encryption tasks, and the instruction set includes SSE3. No x86-64 though.
Quite the opposite – there are multipliers and other hardware dedicated to encryption tasks, and the instruction set includes SSE3. No x86-64 though.
No x86-64 yet, but it is coming in the first half of 2006. There was an announcement about it some time ago:
VIA Unveils Details of Next-Generation Isaiah Processor Core
http://www.viatech.com/en/resources/pressroom/2004_archive/pr041005…
I’d love to have one for a home server. Small, quite, energy efficent. Could probably make a server half the size of a 1U. Can you imagine how many you could fit in a rack case?
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Could do with these ending up in pdas, they’re just too sluggish atm.
Could do with these ending up in pdas, they’re just too sluggish atm.
Too sluggish compared to what? PDA’s don’t have 3GHz P4’s or AMD64’s. A 1GHz C3/C7 will blow the doors off any PDA CPU.
A 1GHz C3/C7 will blow the doors off any PDA CPU.
Exactly, current PDAs are too sluggish and it would be nice to see a more powerful but still very low power chip enter the market.
FOr high performance I prefer AMD for portability and versatility VIA C3 / epia sp seems amazing. Hope to buy a C7 laptop ( I hope intel upgrades its xscale line of products for mini-itx competitors to C3)
It’s worth keeping in mind that XScale is an ARM platform, and you’re pretty much resigned to run Linux or something of that ilk if you are building your own box. Which, of course, isn’t such a bad thing, but the fact that VIA’s solutions are x86 is half the reason the C3 and related products have been so compelling.
that i knows means it has the support for the cool operating systeme from the mac so you can built a hackintosch computer see osx86project.com. happy joy all over!!! wish coming soo. tuned we all
happy day you all. please not comment on the english I having it is only my third year off learning the languge. so please forgive me mine mistakes. see you soon frinds happy day!!
Chu
I love articles written by people who have no clue what they’re talking about:)
Nice product and might be good in a home server setup, but finding vendors who sell Via MBs with CPUs is difficult. Newegg doesn’t seem to carry them anymore.
Anyone know of where they might be available to purchase for consumers?
Good ole Cyrix CPU’s never seem to die. I remember the old days when the doubled as a space heater, Skillet not unlike the AMD K5’s at the time(the only processor that i have ever been burned by) Cheap is nice though perhaps they can capture the sub $100 pc market.
The VIA Linux strategy (last I checked) is to lie to the press about supporting Linux and OSS but generally just ignore their customers.
The only drivers and support you’ll see comes frome the unichrome[0] project.
It wasn’t untill Mars 07[1] this year that VIA even admited that they existed. By then this project had been providing working drivers and end-user support for about two years.
The good news is that the unichrome project is actually quite good at what they do. Even without any support from VIA they managed to create drivers far supperior to anyhing VIA offered.
[0] http://unichrome.sf.net project.
[1] http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=64713…
Sad, but true in my experience. Purchased an older VIA powered motherboard a year or so ago based on all of the “ooo la la” about their Linux support. Nothing but grief and once I actually looked for drivers on one of the VIA sites it was evident that all of that was just someone talking smack…