VIA working on new low-end 64-bit x86 processor

Despite not hearing much from them the last couple of years it seems VIA is still around in the x86 market. The company is working on its first new x86 architecture in years, it's codenamed "Isaiah II" and it will be a 64-bit quad-core architecture manufactured on a 28nm process.

The chip will feature the AVX 2.0 instruction set and it will target Intel's "Bay Trail" Celeron and AMD's "Kabini" Athlon processors. A live demonstration of VIA's new chip was shown off at last month's InfoComm 2014 conference. The test chip had a clockspeed of 2GHz and featured 2MB L2 cache. It was benchmarked with SANDRA and compared to Intel and AMD processors:

The BGA chip was running on a VIA-made motherboard, with its own VIA VX11H chipset. It was compared to AMD Athlon 5350 (quad-core "Jaguar" with 2.05 GHz clocks), and Intel Atom Z3770 (quad-core "Silvermont" with 2.40 GHz clocks). The results are tabulated below. At 2.00 GHz, armed with the latest multimedia and cryptography instruction-sets, VIA's chip is faster than Intel's in most tests, despite lower clocks. It trades blows - and wins - against AMD's chip, in most tests. VIA is expected to launch the first chips based on Isaiah II in late-August, 2014. VIA is hedging its bets with efficient compact PCs, kiosks, and digital signage, with its new chip.