x86 Competition? VIA’s Isaiah II Bay-Trail/AM1 Competitor Ready Aug 31

When it comes to x86 processors you have two obvious choices: Intel or AMD. As of late Intel has started to break away from AMD, becoming the dominant player in the market. Now the main competitor to Intel is not any other x86 manufacturer, but arguably ARM. However, if we stay within the realms of the x86 market there’s “a small guy” that often gets forgotten about: VIA Technology. VIA are hoping to come back with a bang with their latest product release: the Isaiah II based CPU. Benchmarks for the new CPU, summarised in the table below, show that it can compete well with AMD’s Kabini Athlon 5350 and Intel’s Atom Z3770 SoCs.

VIA’s Isaiah II CPU is to be low power, a quad core part and based on 28nm manufacturing. It will also include 64 bit support and AVX2 instruction set support, something found on Haswell CPUs. The below comparisons are hardly fair or useful but are the best to be had at the moment. VIA’s new CPU is more likely to find its way into embedded and industrial spaces than it is to arrive with desktop users, based on their past releases at least. Expect more details in the near future as VIA is hoping to launch the new chip on August 31st EU Time and September 1st Taiwan Time this year. Expect the new chip to be more popular than the last generation of VIA chips, especially considering many international governments are shunning AMD and Intel amidst hardware-level spying allegations: VIA is an Asian company so their new CPUs will no doubt be big in Asia, especially with the Chinese government.

Source: 3DCenter

Image #1 courtesy of VIA, image #2 courtesy of 3DCenter