VIA Launches Low Power Consuming Fanless Eden Range Of Processors For Personal Computers

VIA Launches Low Power Consuming Fanless Eden Range Of Processors For Personal Computers

New Delhi January 18, 2006 Chip maker VIA Technologies, Inc unveiled its latest Eden low-voltage fanless processors today, designed for low-power consuming Personal Computers and set-top boxes. The two new processors including new VIA Eden Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) processor having speed of 1-GHz runs at just 3.5 watts, and the other 1.5-GHz version consumes 7.5 watts. When not needed, both chips idle down to speeds as low as 400 MHz, consuming as little as 500 milliwatts of power in the ULV chip’s case and just 4 watts for the 1.5-GHz Eden.

These processors have been Manufactured using VIA CoolStream architecture and 90 nm process technology, the new 1 GHz VIA Eden ULV processor has a low maximum Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 3.5 watts and the 1.5 GHz part of 7.5 watts. They do not need a fan for cooling as in other processors thus saving space and power.

“To be able to offer processor speeds up to 1.5GHz within such a low power envelope is a remarkable advance for the x86 market, placing us clearly ahead of the competition and enabling more powerful embedded and silent systems,” Richard Brown, vice president of corporate marketing for VIA, said in a statement. “With these unprecedented levels of performance and power efficiency, the new VIA Eden processor looks set to extend our leadership in markets such as thin clients, where increasingly intelligent, stylish x86 devices require more powerful yet still very cool processing capabilities.”

Both new processors follow VIA’s design mantra of low-power processing, which argues that today’s microprocessors have enough computing power for most basic tasks. The new chips also use VIA’s V4 bus, which VIA designed in summer 2005 to replace the Pentium M bus originally designed by Intel Corp.

Internally, the Eden chip contains sixteen pipeline stages, supports the SSE2 and SSE3 multimedia 3D instruction sets, a full-speed floating-point unit and an 128KB full-speed level-2 cache memory. The Eden chips also include VIA’s “Padlock”, which adds a random-number generator for hardware processing of cryptographic algorithms.