Laptop Chips at the OK Coral - VIA C7-M Processor Armed and Aimed at Centrino and Turion

Posted by Matthew Brodsky

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Life is pretty tense in Processor town, but just when you thought it was going to be a straight up gun fight between Centrino Earp and Turion Clanton, the saloon doors swing open, and in swaggers the C7-M Kid - 2GHz shotgun blazing.

Things aregetting pretty tense in Processor town, but just when you thoughtit was going to be a straight up gun fight between Wyatt Centrinoand Ike Turion, the saloon doors burst open, and in swaggers theC7-M Kid - 2GHz guns blazing. Can VIA Technologies send AMD and Intel mobile processors to bootup hill, with the release of their C7-M chip?

Aimed at the ultralight notebook sector, with predicted speeds as fast as 2 GHz, theprocessor also boasts state-of-the-art battery management,performance, and security capabilities. For computer nerds, theprocessor makes a tantalizing alternative to Intel's Centrino,and AMD's Turion platforms.

VIA designed the processor with its CoolStream architecture and "Esther" core, along with thePowerSaver feature. This optimizes its power usage, resulting instats like: only 100mW (0.1W) of juice used in idle mode and 20watts of max thermal design power at 2 GHz. The C7-M is capableof slipping into a sleep mode that is virtually catatonic andburns through barely no fuel.

Meanwhile,the processor is versatile enough to manage as either a gaming center or a business notebook. The VIA can dance between tasksthanks to its one-of-a-kind TwinTurbo PLL implementation. And theprocessoralso features 128KB L2 cache with 32-way associativity, FloatingPoint Unit at full-speed, 16 pipeline stages, StepAhead AdvancedBranch Prediction, and support for SSE2 and SSE3 multimediainstruction sets.

For security, the VIA Padlock Hardware Security Suite nowincludes a top-notch random number generator and AES EncryptionEngine. These security measures, and more such as executeprotection (NX) against malicious apps and code, are built rightinto the processor die. Can't wait to test the C7-M out foryourself? Well, you'll have to. VIA doesn't expect the processorto be available for the mass market until the second quarter of2005.

If you really want a notebook fitted with a processor other thana Sonoma offering from Intel, you'll be pleased to hear that AMD have justlaunched their 64 bitTurion processor. Companies like HP/Compaq, and Acerhave already boarded the Turion train.

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