VIA Isaiah II chip coming soon
VIA has been relatively quiet in the last few years, but it looks like the third active licencee of Intel's x86 architecture will soon launch a new chip. Codenamed Isaiah II, this processor is expected to use a combined x86/ARM microprocessor design that VIA patented three years ago and the first benchmark results look really interesting.
The Isaiah II is a 2 GHz quad-core chip with 2 MB of L2 cache and is capable of beating the Intel Atom Z3770 by a large margin in a variety of SiSoftware Sandra tests. Even more, it can go head to head with the AMD Athlon 5350 and wins most tests against it as well, although the results are usually very close this time.
The first engineering samples were tested by VIA at its InfoComm 2014 booth and it only remains to be seen if the chip arrives soon enough to take advantage of the hype created.
According to multiple sources, the first processors based on the Isaiah II architecture should become available in late August. Unfortunately, VIA Technologies did not confirm this yet.
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