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  • 01-24-2008 7:30 AM

    Via's Isaiah Is Out Of Order...And That's Good

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    Via Technologies, and their subsidiary,
    Centaur, think their next generation 64-bit processor, the Isaiah, will
    outperform Intel's soon to be released Silverthorne chip. Glenn Henry
    of Centaur hedges his bet a little, as hard info about Silverthorne's
    capabilities is hard to come by. And he says Isaiah won't be able to
    match a Core 2 Duo. But in the niche of low power consumption/high
    performance/inexpensive processors, Isaiah's "out-of-order" processor
    architecture might make Via a winner.

    An in-order processor
    is similar to a factory with a single assembly line. The chip can only
    work on one operation at a time, and other operations must wait for the
    assembly line to clear before they can be processed. An out-of-order
    processor, like Isaiah and Intel's Core 2 chips, is equivalent to a
    factory with multiple assembly lines where different operations can be
    processed simultaneously.

    Other factors also come into play.
    Silverthorne likely has a substantially smaller cache than Isaiah
    processors -- which have 1M byte of level 2 cache -- and could use a
    slower front-side bus, giving Via's chip an additional edge, Henry said.

    Silverthorne's
    performance will also be constrained by business considerations.
    "They've got to protect the high-end money makers in the Intel product
    line," Henry said.


    This is why we need competition in
    the chip industry. If Intel isn't pushed by other manufacturers, they
    might configure their processors more towards maximizing profits on
    their whole line than putting out the best units they can. Of course,
    Silverthorne might come out later this year and have out-of-order
    processing. Competition works both ways, whether you're David or
    Goliath.



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