VIA Nano QuadCore (X4)
Thursday, May 12th, 2011So VIA now enters the game of many-core with the VIA Nano QuadCore.
Unfortunately, however, the dual-core VIA Nano X2 did not yet even made it to the market. The VIA Nano already was years late, and so is the X2. I guess this time they may ship the QuadCore sooner, because it mostly consists of two X2 dies, which will probably help to start shipping the X2 and QuadCore in a similar timeframe.
Without all these delays, or slow development –whatever you want to name it– I’m sure VIA would have been more successful over the last years. This way Intel and AMD could get into the lower-power market easily, and quickly. And this while Intel’s Atom is only deliver an “abysmal” year 2004 Transmeta Efficeon performance.
The X2 and QuadCore thermal design power (TDP) is not that low either, 25W for the fastest X2, and 27W for the (lower-clocked) QuadCore + ~5W for the chipset and graphics. AMD’s Fusion E-350 runs at 18W, while the C- and G- series are down to 5W-9W, including the memory controller and graphics: Fusion.
VIA will continue to have a hard time competing against AMD’s high-performance, low-power offerings, as well as Intel’s less-performing either lower-power (Z-series Atom) or higher-power regular Atoms.
PS: What surprises me in Anandtech’s report is, that VIA Centaur is running their simulation cluster with Intel CPUs. I certainly would not feed my competitor, and instead rather use my own CPUs. This would not only thoroughly stress test them, but also motivate the engineers to develop performant next-gen chips, … And: You seriously expect other cloud folks (Facebook, Google, et al.) to run clusters of VIA CPUs if VIA is not even doing so in-house???
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The only thing one could barely consider was the previously expensive, and now discontinued 
