Taiwanese chip firm Via has launched five versions of its Isaiah microprocessor - a chip that Centaur's CEO Glenn Henry describes as being built from a clean slate.

Henry told the IT Examiner that the chip, which will be built by Fujitsu's SPARC fab, includes the L-Series which consists of chips at 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz low power, and the U Series which comes at clock speeds of 1GHz, 1.2GHz and 1.3GHz. Samples are already shipping and production quantities will come out of the fabs in the third quarter of this year.
Henry said: 'We put a lot of effort into the FP (floating point) unit, and so we have very powerful part - it's faster and and it's completely different from the [Via] C-7 part. This part is designed to be something different. This is a part that's designed to be a lot faster.'

The chips are the L2100 (1.8GHz/25W), the L2200 (1.6GHz/17W), the U2400 (1.3GHz/8W), the U2500 (1.2GHz/6.8W) and the U2300 (1GHz/5W). All the chips use a 800MHz bus speed.

He said that while the Nanoprocessor is socket compatible with the C-7, meaning there are plenty of viable working designs where all that needs to be swapped out is the chip, 'the new thing is that it is an out of order processor, with sophisticated pre-fetching. We started it with a clean sheet of paper.'

Glenn Henry allowed himself to be drawn on Intel's Atom design - in his own words he got on his soapbox. He said of Intel's forthcoming mini-chip: 'Our part will be faster than the Atom. We have heard reports of people that had both and they confirmed ours are faster.' He claimed that while it was true that chip makers chose the benchmarks that suited them, in the 'fullness of time' they [Intel] would not outperform the Nanoprocessor with the Atom.

While the C7 was a chip built at 90 nanometres, the Nanoprocessor was a 65 nanometre processor. He paid tribute to Intel process technology. 'Intel's Atom has one huge huge advantage over us, they did it with the best tech they had at 45 nanometres.' He said that if the Nanoprocessor was built at 45 nanometres, Via would beat Intel 'even more'. He claimed that Intel normally reserved its best technology for its high end chips, but this time round it had concentrated on using it on a low end chip.

Via marketing VP Richard Brown chipped in to our conversation with Henry to say that while Intel had a reference design for its Diamondville platform, it placed restrictions on the designs which didn't apply to the Nanoprocessor. Intel placed restrictions on the reference board and prevented people implementing PCI Express and other features. Brown would not reveal prices for the Nano - but said they would be 'competitive'.

Henry said: 'In a sense we have stacks of reference designs with the C7. Every one of them works with the Nano. Intel has a new platform for MIDs versus a notebook platform.' Talk of dual core Atom chips was only good for marketing people, said Henry. Dual core only made a lot of difference 'marketwise', he said. While there are some applications which can take advantage of dual cores, the type of apps that the Nanoprocessor and Atom were aimed at - such as web browsing, email and the like weren't relevant.

He said: 'Intel has tremendous leverage on the benchmarks', particularly through organisations like Bapco. He said: 'A lot of benchmarks are moving to take advantage of dual cores.' This made sense, marketing wise, but practically speaking if a vendor built a UPMC there was no advantage at all. A UMPC wasn't being used to make Blu-ray applications, or anything like that.

He said: 'What are the real applications people do with dual cores? We've made a perfectly good living with a processor running at 1.5GHz.'