VIA's Dual Core Nano & VN1000 Chipset Previewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 15, 2010 12:26 PM ESTFinal Words
It's not hard to beat Atom. The chip was originally designed to be used in MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and aimed at smartphones, but found extra work in netbooks and nettops. Intel has also been very conservative with Atom's roadmap. The chip is still on 45nm while Intel is a little over a year away from beginning its move to 22nm. Atom's architecture also remains in-order, while ARM, AMD and VIA are all presenting if not shipping out-of-order alternatives aimed at similar PC markets.
The dual-core Nano platform offers better graphics performance and better CPU performance than Atom. The Chrome 520 IGP, at times, can even give Intel's HD Graphics a run for the money. The two unknowns are power consumption and price. The former will change as VIA transitions to 40nm, while I couldn't get an answer out of VIA on the latter. Current Nano motherboards retail for around $120, but that's for the single core offering. At 40nm VIA should be able to offer two Nano cores for the same price. If you can buy a DC Nano board with BGA chip for around $120, it'll be a steal compared to Atom and more powerful platforms.
The biggest competitor for Nano may not end up being Intel after all. AMD's Bobcat is due to ship to OEMs before the end of the year, and before the end of the week we'll have our full performance preview of it.
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ckryan - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
I recongnize that some people may totally write VIA off in this market, but don't overlook the fact that an improved shipping model of this board could at least cause Intel to rethink its Atom strategy. I really wanted an Atom system for a while, but then I realized for the same price as the setup I wanted, an i3/gigabyte mini itx system would be about the same price. A stripped down Atom board from Intel wouldn't be worthwhile at all, even if it is $80. In the business and mobile spaces, Atoms make a good argument. Its just a stale argument. AMD and VIA bringing more options to the market can't be called a bad thing. My hope is not just that VIA doesn't fail entirely, but that I have lots of interesting options in the near future.DanNeely - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Intel definitely could use a chip midway between the current atom and CULV product lines. The dual core atoms don't really help much; yeah they're better at decoding video that the GPU doesn't support, but the atoms general performance problems are single threaded in nature.Clocking the chip up to ~2.5ghz would probably help a good bit there but would probably blow the power budget out of the water.
Intel's stated that atom will remain in order for at least the first 4-5 years, so we shouldn't expect this to change. With intel primarily aiming atom at Arm's market share something that adds a lot of complexity to the chip is probably out of the question anyway.
A more efficient memory controller connection might help. The current implementation is on die FSB so there's definite room to improve here. How much this would help is something of an open question though. Outside of memory bound benchmarks the ~2x latency difference between the directly connected and on die FSB controllers in lga 1366 vs 1156 i7's wasn't very large; but as an in order CPU with a tiny cache memory latency is a bigger impact on the atoms performance, although this is partially balanced by it having a much lower load on the memory sub system due to is generally slow performance This might be the easiest place for Intel to speed things up though.
Alternatively the runtime gap between atom and CULV isn't that large, it might be possible to push it down into the current atoms power envelope even at atom drops into the higher end part of Arms territory.
danacee - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
I remember reading an article last year from digit life that you can get some pretty massive performance gains on a Nano just by tricking your windows install into thinking its Intel. Seens the code handed to the nano is pretty shoddy even next to AMD.Anand, to get a true representation of the nano's performance I'm afraid you will have to do a cpu-z hack.
danacee - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
found it;http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/via-nano-cpuid-f...
sprockkets - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
Why is there a "ATI Radeon HD 5450" in the power consumption graphs? That makes no sense. Where is the Athlon X2 3250e?Should compare the processor in this system, the Neo X2, if different:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
yuhong - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
"Despite the typical omg-thisisntATI/NVIDIA error that some games always throw,"NT 4's CPUID code was full of such problems:
http://geoffchappell.com/viewer.htm?doc=studies/wi...
Even more recently, 64-bit Windows has a hardcoded list of CPU vendors it will run on, and will BSoD with UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR on any other vendor. An update had to be released to add CentaurHauls to the list.
Is there an option in the BIOS to fake a GenuineIntel CPU vendor?
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
A fair and competitive marketplace!mschira - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
The complete Via CPU story - long before they named it Nano - is essentially a story of not delivering.All these jesaya and what not platforms one could never really by them.
And yes Nano looks nice, the single core one didn't look to bad a year ago. But where is anything build with it that one can buy?
More competition? Great! but please make it to market.
Maybe now is the time Nvidia buys VIA.
M.
jo-82 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Sorry, but my old Epia C7 sucks only 25W from the socket, and its fast enough for the job.LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
When VIA comes out with a product, I really want to like it, and I want them to succeed. I actually got a cheapie notebook for a parent with a C7-M processor that worked well for quite some time until their needs grew. That said, here are my two issues."I should add that although the Chrome 520 GPU does support H.264 acceleration, I couldn't get it working with the driver drop I had on my test platform. CPU utilization would be low but I still dropped frames. I suspect this is a driver or software compatibility issue which I do expect VIA to rectify before the platform ships."
VIA (or should I say S3) has had many times where a graphics driver with bugs or compatibility issues that have delayed a product's potential after its release until it is no longer competitive with newer offerings. If the bugs aren't fixed at initial product release (I hope they are, but from experience...) that would be a huge strike against this.
"The DC Nano platform I tested is built on an old 65nm manufacturing process at TSMC. As a result, power consumption isn't that great. Also note that VIA doesn't do any power gating, so idle power ends up being very similar to Clarkdale"
If the Nano had power consumption that beat AMD but lost to Intel, I think we'd all be excited. Heck, if it matched AMD but with lower heat output, I think I still would be. However, we're looking at a product that cannot beat a Core i3 in performance, that equals it in power consumption. I think not doing power gating is a huge mistake here.
I hope the released product has the driver issue fixed, and I hope VIA can consolidate their architecture (i.e., turn a 2-core Nano into an SoC or at least a partial SoC) for power savings, lower expense, and maybe performance improvement. That said, I'll also believe it when I see it.