VIA’s line of CPUs, developed by its Centaur subsidiary, have focused on delivering “enough” performance at very low power. The Centaur line is also very low cost, due to tiny die sizes relative to Intel and AMD CPUs.
Rather than take Intel head-on, however, VIA’s approach has been to develop a complete platform, based around its tiny motherboards, which are suitable for low power, embedded applications. Some of the more recent products, like the C7 line, have also garnered design wins in low cost “mini-note” laptops and ultra-mobile PCs.
However, the VIA CPUs were also derided as being low performance. “Good enough” was probably good enough for very light duty office applications, “nettop” PCs, and dedicated, embedded applications where power and form factor was critical.
Glenn Henry, Centaur’s chief architect, decided it was time to flex a little design muscle and develop a processor that offered performance good enough to compete in a more mainstream environment.
The VIA Nano architecture certainly has the right ingredients. The CPU is an out-of-order, superscalar design with a substantially beefed-up floating point unit. It is, however, still a very lean design, eschewing enhancements such as simultaneous multithreading. The Centaur team did build in the hooks to build multicore versions of the Nano, but the first CPUs off the fab lines will be single core processors.
Alas, time and technology march on. Intel has adopted the low power religion, shipping iterations of the Silverthorne architecture. Now known as Atom, Intel’s new CPU seems like a throwback: An in-order design that sacrifices advanced architectural features in order to minimize power usage.However, Atom does have one ace up its sleeve: simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which Intel calls Hyper-Threading. That turns out to be pretty important, as we’ll shortly see.
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