This blog post references my article 'Double take: Reassessing x86 CPUs in embedded-system applications' in EDN's April 27, 2006 edition.

Via’s M10000 board, which I tested for EDN’s March 4, 2004, issue, wasn’t a particularly high-performance platform (at least in the relative sense). To put its speed in perspective, I’ll re-quote from one of that article’s sidebars, “After examining this project’s benchmark results and its Beyond TV and other travails, you might walk away with a pessimistic viewpoint of the Via M10000 platform. That perception would be unfortunate and inaccurate. As AMD and Intel have learned, to their distress, even several-year-old CPUs are adequate for servicing most traditional PC functions—a fact that consumers are also increasingly figuring out. And, when performing these functions, Spirit felt as nimble to me as my 2-GHz desktop PC and was noticeably faster than my 800-MHz Transmeta Crusoe-equipped notebook.”

With that qualifier (which still holds true) out of the way, it’s still clear that Via needed to boost both its CPU and chipset performance to remain competitive with AMD and Intel. This improvement has ended up being a slower-than-forecasted, multi-stage process. It began when Via bolted its Nehemiah CPU to the CN400 chip set, which supported PC3200 DDR SDRAM and SATA hard-disk drives, although the CPU’s 133-MHz front-side bus still hampered system performance. The VT-310DP board now in my possession has two 1-GHz Nehemiah CPUs, thereby representing an interesting alternative approach for a company that currently has no dual-core CPU in its portfolio. Via classifies single-CPU CN400-based boards as the EPIA SP series.

The 200-MHz-front-side-bus variant of Via’s Nehemiah CPU that I mentioned in my March 4, 2004, article never appeared on any of the company's mini-ITX system boards. However, in early March Via publicly unveiled its 90-nm SOI (silicon-on-insulator) process-based C7 CPU, which it code-names Esther. Featuring 400- or 533-MHz-front-side-bus speeds (with future plans for an 800-MHz FSB version), C7 CPUs include 128 kbytes each of L1 and L2 cache. Via’s promotional materials tout clock speeds as high as 2 GHz, along with a claimed“average of 15% better performance per watt than an Intel Pentium-M processor at equivalent speed grade.”