Skeptical to the bitter end, VIA just has never impressed me all that much. Now they are promising 2 GHz for 20 watts. Cool, but can they make good on this?

Over the past five years, Transmeta and Via have been battling Intel in the field of low power processors. With Transmeta basically gone from this market, Via has to fill this role alone. The company on Friday launched a new and attack at Intel: According to the company, the new C7 processor family simply is the lowest power and most secure native x86 processor money can buy.

The chip was developed by Via-Centaur and is based on the “Esther” core. It uses IBM’s 90 nm SOI technology, integrates 128 KByte L1 and L2 cache, and supports SSE2 and SSE3. The chip is the smallest device in its competitive field today, measuring just 30 mm2. Idle power of the processor comes in as low as 0.1 watts while running the chip at 2 GHz consumes about 20 watts at peak levels. Via claims the processors runs about 40 percent “cooler” than its competition. [Read the rest]