I have a Via C7-D 1500mhz machine(esther core), the board is a VIA PC1, all installed in a powercool case/psu . 2.5 hitachi 1TB SATA, 2 gig of DDR2. It's a nice little machine, but not in any way fast!! Probably mostly held back by the crappy Via Unichrome on board IGP. My Pentium 4 1.8A with only 1 gig and a geforce4mx leaves it in the dust.

What it does do however is run cool and quiet using very little power, coretemp shows 52C for the cpu under sustained full load, but only 25c(just above ambient) on idle, that is with only the tiny CPU fan, no other cooling whatsoever.
I've never seen a nano system either, never mind a muli-core version, TBH I don't think they ever really made it here to the west.
In many ways the system is a anachronism, melding modern features like SATA and DDR2 memory, quad pumped bus etc onto what is pretty much a 1990's cpu. Interesting little machine really.

I've seen a few C7 systems historically (Everex and Acer "value" desktops) - they tended to not be very fast, and the boards tended to not have much in the way of expansion to help them out with things like a good GPU. In some cases the CPU is soldered-in. Supposed to be (at least for their day) monsters at encryption though (I remember VIA claiming one of the C7 series was able to better a 2.8GHz Northwood at certain crypto tasks; no idea under what conditions or if it's actually backed up by a third-party though). Nothing I'd honestly want to deal with if an Intel or AMD system were available to me...

As far as the Nano and Atom and whatnot - the single-core Atom in my Eee 1000H is consistently slower in synthetics than my Wilamette 2GHz; its only real "selling point" is that unlike the Willamette it doesn't gobble down almost 100W of power and instead can run for hours (assuming you're doing basic tasks on it) on battery power. I I remember reading a review about that Asus "gaming" netbook that paired a mobile GeForce with an Atom, and it both didn't perform so well, and ran very hot in the attempt; actually found that review here: http://techreport.com/review/15940/asus-n10jc-a1-netbook/5

Personally if I were going with ITX or some other low-power solution I'd stick to Intel, because the Intel IGPs are more up-to-date with multimedia decoding than a lot of the S3/VIA graphics (supposedly the most recent S3 graphics, the 500 series, are pretty modern and support things like DX10.1, GPU computing, etc but I've literally never seen one outside of the S3 website), and you'll see similar power consumption from their LV and ULV models (and potentially better CPU performance as well). Some of their new Pentium and Core i3 models are very impressive in terms of performance-per-watt.

There must have been something about Nano that was uninteresting to OEMs that prevented it from coming in during the original Atom era. Either it wasn't quite up to what the spec sheet bragged about, or there were supply issues.

Once AMD brought out their Bobcat CPU, Nano's window of opportunity was gone.

They have a decent performing quad core but everything around it is so dated that making it into a decent platform would be too costly. IPC it is up there with AMD and surprisingly close to Intel but behind fpu wise. At least it has better fpu performance than what amd has but the lack of a imc (integrated memory controller) and the fact it is a pair of dual cores on a mcm package. Too late for VIA unless someone invests a decent amount of money and even then they wouldn't capture but maybe 3-5% of the market. Everything else they have for the most part sucks hard except for one of the dual cores out there.

BSA Starfire wrote:

I have a Via C7-D 1500mhz machine(esther core), the board is a VIA PC1, all installed in a powercool case/psu . 2.5 hitachi 1TB […]
Show full quote

I have a Via C7-D 1500mhz machine(esther core), the board is a VIA PC1, all installed in a powercool case/psu . 2.5 hitachi 1TB SATA, 2 gig of DDR2. It's a nice little machine, but not in any way fast!! Probably mostly held back by the crappy Via Unichrome on board IGP. My Pentium 4 1.8A with only 1 gig and a geforce4mx leaves it in the dust.

IMG_0309.jpg

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IMG_0312.jpg

IMG_0338.jpg

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What it does do however is run cool and quiet using very little power, coretemp shows 52C for the cpu under sustained full load, but only 25c(just above ambient) on idle, that is with only the tiny CPU fan, no other cooling whatsoever.
I've never seen a nano system either, never mind a muli-core version, TBH I don't think they ever really made it here to the west.
In many ways the system is a anachronism, melding modern features like SATA and DDR2 memory, quad pumped bus etc onto what is pretty much a 1990's cpu. Interesting little machine really.

I knew the C7 was slow, but being blown away by a P4 @ 1.8 puts that in perspective. I had always read that the C7 was a sort of tweaked Centaur core from the VIA-Cyrix III days, so I guess it wouldn't scale that well and shouldn't be that surprising.

I like the idea of mixing old and new tech - mainly under the "because you can" file - so DDR2 and SATA on a late 90's variant core is pleasing. That's actually a nice little system. 😎

swaaye wrote:

There must have been something about Nano that was uninteresting to OEMs that prevented it from coming in during the original Atom era. Either it wasn't quite up to what the spec sheet bragged about, or there were supply issues.

Once AMD brought out their Bobcat CPU, Nano's window of opportunity was gone.

That's what's so puzzling. The Nano seemed clearly superior to Atom (and probably remained so up until at least Cedar Trail) and it also supported x64 and (iirc) SSE4.

I have vague memories of a bunch of netbook announcements with Nano that never materialized, but they could be just fuzzy recollections as searches only really reveal references to those three note[net]books mentioned above, so maybe nothing else was ever planned.

Perhaps NVIDIA's Ion took some steam out of it? I remember that being one avenue of making Atom less painful vs the 945gm. The IdeaPad S12 had an Ion-Atom variant in addition to the Nano one.

nforce4max wrote:

They have a decent performing quad core but everything around it is so dated that making it into a decent platform would be too costly. IPC it is up there with AMD and surprisingly close to Intel but behind fpu wise. At least it has better fpu performance than what amd has but the lack of a imc (integrated memory controller) and the fact it is a pair of dual cores on a mcm package.

Does the lack of an IMC really hurt it though vs a modern Atom? (I am aware Atom has improved significantly so maybe the answer is indeed yes). But I recall a lot of speculation about how Intel wouldn't be able to recover in the Athlon 64 days until it integrated an IMC - and they ended up squeaking another 5 years or so out of the FSB when Conroe came along.

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

I knew the C7 was slow, but being blown away by a P4 @ 1.8 puts that in perspective. I had always read that the C7 was a sort of […]
Show full quote

BSA Starfire wrote:

I have a Via C7-D 1500mhz machine(esther core), the board is a VIA PC1, all installed in a powercool case/psu . 2.5 hitachi 1TB […]
Show full quote

I have a Via C7-D 1500mhz machine(esther core), the board is a VIA PC1, all installed in a powercool case/psu . 2.5 hitachi 1TB SATA, 2 gig of DDR2. It's a nice little machine, but not in any way fast!! Probably mostly held back by the crappy Via Unichrome on board IGP. My Pentium 4 1.8A with only 1 gig and a geforce4mx leaves it in the dust.

IMG_0309.jpg

IMG_0310.jpg

IMG_0312.jpg

IMG_0338.jpg

IMG_0339.jpg

What it does do however is run cool and quiet using very little power, coretemp shows 52C for the cpu under sustained full load, but only 25c(just above ambient) on idle, that is with only the tiny CPU fan, no other cooling whatsoever.
I've never seen a nano system either, never mind a muli-core version, TBH I don't think they ever really made it here to the west.
In many ways the system is a anachronism, melding modern features like SATA and DDR2 memory, quad pumped bus etc onto what is pretty much a 1990's cpu. Interesting little machine really.

I knew the C7 was slow, but being blown away by a P4 @ 1.8 puts that in perspective. I had always read that the C7 was a sort of tweaked Centaur core from the VIA-Cyrix III days, so I guess it wouldn't scale that well and shouldn't be that surprising.

I like the idea of mixing old and new tech - mainly under the "because you can" file - so DDR2 and SATA on a late 90's variant core is pleasing. That's actually a nice little system. 😎

swaaye wrote:

There must have been something about Nano that was uninteresting to OEMs that prevented it from coming in during the original Atom era. Either it wasn't quite up to what the spec sheet bragged about, or there were supply issues.

Once AMD brought out their Bobcat CPU, Nano's window of opportunity was gone.

That's what's so puzzling. The Nano seemed clearly superior to Atom (and probably remained so up until at least Cedar Trail) and it also supported x64 and (iirc) SSE4.

I have vague memories of a bunch of netbook announcements with Nano that never materialized, but they could be just fuzzy recollections as searches only really reveal references to those three note[net]books mentioned above, so maybe nothing else was ever planned.

Perhaps NVIDIA's Ion took some steam out of it? I remember that being one avenue of making Atom less painful vs the 945gm. The IdeaPad S12 had an Ion-Atom variant in addition to the Nano one.

nforce4max wrote:

They have a decent performing quad core but everything around it is so dated that making it into a decent platform would be too costly. IPC it is up there with AMD and surprisingly close to Intel but behind fpu wise. At least it has better fpu performance than what amd has but the lack of a imc (integrated memory controller) and the fact it is a pair of dual cores on a mcm package.

Does the lack of an IMC really hurt it though vs a modern Atom? (I am aware Atom has improved significantly so maybe the answer is indeed yes). But I recall a lot of speculation about how Intel wouldn't be able to recover in the Athlon 64 days until it integrated an IMC - and they ended up squeaking another 5 years or so out of the FSB when Conroe came along.

If your interested, check out page 9 of this thread My 3DMark01 Mega Thread I have posted 3Dmark01 scores for both the P4 1.8(5011 3Dmarks) and the C7-D(1346 3Dmarks). I do have a 1.5ghz Pentium 4 chip, might swap it out later and run the bench again as this will give a clock for clock comparison.

update, I ran superPi on both to 1million, the P4 managed 1 minute 35.157seconds. The C7 6 minutes 12.219 seconds!!!!!! Slow doesn't begin to cover it...........