VIA Technologies announced details of their new processor architecture which is called the VIA Isaiah Architecture. Designed from the ground up by VIA’s US based processor design subsidiary, Centaur Technology, the Isaiah Architecture comes with features such as 64 bit superscalar speculative out-of-order microarchitecture, high performance multimedia computation, and a new virtual machine architecture. VIA’s aim is similar as before – deliver a high performance processor which also minimizes power consumption thus enabling small footprint systems such as ultra-mobile PCs and small form factor PCs.

The very first processors based on the Isaiah Architecture will use a 65 nm process technology and will also be pin compatible with the VIA C7 processor family which will enable a smooth transition for system builders.

Highlights of the Isaiah Architecture include the following:

• 64 bit Superscalar Speculative Out-of-Order Microarchtecture
• Initial clock speeds of up to 2GHz and a high speed, low power front side bus scalable from 800 MHz to 1333 MHz
• Two 64KB L1 caches and 1MB exclusive L2 cache with 16 way associativity
• Integrates the world’s fastest x86 processor floating point unit with ability to execute four floating point adds, and four multiples per clock
• Support for new SSE instructions
• 128 bit wide integer data path
• Utilizes new low power circuit techniques
• New C6 power state where power is turned off to the caches
• Pin to pin compatible with VIA C7 processor
• VIA PadLock Hardware Security features including random number generator, AES encryption engine, SHA-1 and SHA-256 hashing

You can read more about the new architecture here on VIA’s website. You can expect to see processors based on the VIA Isaiah Architecture to start shipping during the first half of 2008.

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