Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4017/vias-dual-core-nano-vn1000-chipset-previewed



I haven’t had an official product briefing with VIA in years. The last time I met with a representative from the company was two years ago outside of IDF in San Francisco. Before then, it was probably around 4 years.

VIA was the first casualty of integration in the PC space. Today we’re all talking about moving graphics onto the processor die, but a few years ago we were having similar discussions about moving the memory controller and north bridge on die. As a manufacturer of chipsets (north and south bridges) for CPUs, VIA lost relevance in the x86 CPU market as the need for a third party chipset maker faded.

VIA’s recent visit to me in Raleigh, NC had two purposes according to the company. One, to remind me that VIA was still around and to give me some face to face time with a VIA representative (appreciated). And two, to showcase VIA’s dual-core Nano platform and brand new integrated graphics chipset (intriguing).

For those of you who don’t know, Nano is VIA’s answer to Atom, except it came along long before Atom did. Just like Atom, Nano was designed in Texas but by VIA’s Centaur team - a microprocessor company it acquired several years back. Centaur’s speciality was low power microarchitectures, and Nano is exactly that.

Compared to Atom, Nano is a bit of a beast. Both Atom and AMD’s Bobat core can fetch and issue up to two instructions. Nano can do three. Like AMD’s Bobcat, Nano has a full out of order execution engine. Atom, for the time being, is in-order.

The execution engine is well matched to the front end. Nano features seven dispatch ports and can retire up to three instructions per clock. In this sense, Nano is more like AMD’s Bobcat than Intel’s Atom. In fact, those two should be better matched than Atom vs. Nano.


VIA's Nano

Nano has other advantages over Atom. It features a hardware encryption engine. Something VIA introduced long before Intel’s AES-NI in Westmere. All of these features come at the expense of power consumption. Nano should be faster, but it draws more power than Atom.

VIA is a fabless semiconductor manufacturer, its Nano processor and associated chipset are both fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan. Nano is currently a 65nm design although VIA plans to take it to 40nm in 2011.

The dual-core Nano that VIA dropped off is architecturally identical to the existing Nano. Similar to the dual-core CPUs, DC Nano is literally two Nano die placed alongside one another. The L2 caches are private and all core-to-core communication happens externally via the Nano’s latest chipset: VIA’s VN1000. The dual-core die measures 8.5 mm x 16 mm (136mm^2 total area) on a 21 mm x 21 mm BGA package.

Ironically enough, VIA hasn’t integrated a memory controller into its own CPU design. Although to VIA’s credit, the CPU’s performance is competitive without it. I suspect VIA will deliver a more integrated version of Nano within the next 12 - 18 months.

While the dual core Nano improves competitiveness with Intel’s Atom, it’s the VN1000 that’s a huge step forward. These days everyone is talking about graphics and VIA is no exception. The VN1000 integrates S3’s Chrome 520, a brand new DirectX 10 GPU. VIA was light on architectural details other than to state that it has 32 stream processors and 4 texture sampling units. The VN1000 die is nearly as big as the CPU at 100mm^2 on a 65nm process. VIA claims that the 520’s performance is easily good enough for mainstream graphics.

Armed with a reference ATX motherboard, I was eager to verify those claims. Note that this review appears a lot later than expected as our original DC Nano reference board was damaged in transport. It wouldn't do anything beyond POST so what you're looking at is our second sample.



Graphics Performance: Surprisingly Potent

Preparing to test the VN1000 was a lot like deciding to go see a John Cusack movie. You assume it’s going to be bad, but every now and then you might be pleasantly surprised. My expectations were thus very low.

The last VIA platform I had wouldn’t complete most 2D benchmarks in Windows 7 due to driver issues and general instability. That’s why you only see a few scores from the old Nano in Bench. The VN1000 was completely different.


The VIA VN1000 Reference Board featured VGA, HDMI and DP outputs

Despite the typical omg-thisisntATI/NVIDIA error that some games always throw, the VN1000 actually ran everything I threw at it. I didn’t notice any rendering errors or any driver compatibility problems. I didn’t run every last title on the market, but I ran a number that I honestly didn’t expect VIA to be able to handle. And the VN1000 did.

Dragon Age, Modern Warfare 2, BioShock 2, World of Warcraft and even Starcraft II all ran on the VN1000. Not only did they run, but some of them actually ran pretty well.

As with all integrated graphics I had to test at the lowest possible quality settings at 1024 x 768 across virtually all titles. I should add that although the Chrome 520 GPU does support H.264 acceleration, I couldn't get it working with the driver drop I had on my test platform. CPU utilization would be low but I still dropped frames. I suspect this is a driver or software compatibility issue which I do expect VIA to rectify before the platform ships.

First let’s compare directly to Atom and ION:

World of Warcraft - 800 x 600 - Good Quality

Left 4 Dead - 800 x 600 - Lowest Quality

The Atom comparison is dramatic. Intel hasn’t taken GPU performance seriously for years and Atom was the last example of that mentality. What’s even more surprising however is that the Chrome 520 GPU is actually faster than NVIDIA’s ION.

Clearly the VN1000 can hold its own in the Atom space, so let’s set our sights a little higher. How about Clarkdale?

Integrated Graphics Performance - Dragon Age Origins

Under Dragon Age Clarkdale puts VIA in its place. The Core i3 manages a 40% performance advantage here. But look at a lower end competitor: the Pentium G6950 is no faster than the dual core Nano/VN1000 platform!

It gets even more ridiculous under Modern Warfare 2:

Integrated Graphics Performance - Modern Warfare 2

VIA’s platform is actually faster than Intel’s Core i3 with integrated graphics. The same holds true under World of Warcraft:

Integrated Graphics Performance - World of Warcraft

Here the Nano is able to even equal the performance of the Core i5 661. Pretty impressive.

Integrated Graphics Performance - BioShock 2

The VIA platform didn't handle BioShock 2 very well, but it's still able to get the Pentium G6950 a run for its money.

I was particularly curious to see how Starcraft II ran on the platform. Starcraft II can be both GPU and CPU limited within a single play session simply depending on what you're doing. Scrolling around the map and just watching your units gather resources tends to be GPU bound on mainstream or faster systems. Big battles however are almost always CPU bound. To showcase both we have two benchmarks. Our GPU test is a 2v2 with a lot of scrolling around the map, while our CPU test is a 3v3 monitoring frame rate during a huge battle involving all of the players.

Integrated Graphics Performance - Starcraft 2 - GPU Test

Integrated Graphics Performance - Starcraft 2 - CPU Test

VIA's Chrome 520 is definitely fast enough for Starcraft II. At low quality settings, the VIA platform can manage nearly 50 fps in our GPU test. That translates into smooth gameplay while moving around a map and selecting units. It's the CPU that's holding back the platform. In large battles the Nano DC drops down below 10 fps and choppiness ensues. Intel's Clarkdale graphics enjoys around 2x the performance in our CPU test and about 60% higher frame rates in the GPU test. Intel has done a lot of work with Blizzard optimizing for SC2, so strong performance here isn't surprising.

Overall, you can color me impressed. This is real world, usable performance. Even the experience under Windows wasn’t half bad. Moving windows around was sometimes choppy but for the most part it could’ve been any other integrated graphics platform that I was using. Drivers installed fine and I didn’t get any strange crashes or compatibility errors during my limited testing period.

I have to say that this is probably the first VIA platform that has delivered not only competitive but impressive graphics performance in years. Let’s take a look at the CPU performance.



CPU Performance

Overall CPU performance is typically leaps and bounds better than Intel’s dual-core Atom D510. However that’s an easy target to beat. If we look at an identically (or even lower) clocked Pentium or Celeron dual-core processor, VIA loses.

SYSMark 2007 - Overall

Adobe Photoshop CS4 - Retouch Artists Benchmark

Photoshop performance is actually pretty impressive for the platform we're looking at. You get performance that's in the range of low end Pentium Dual-Core processors.

x264 HD Encode - 1st Pass

Even video encoding impresses as the DC Nano platform is faster than AMD's dual-core 1.5GHz Athlon X2. Intel has the performance-per-clock advantage with the Pentium dual-core but Atom is nowhere near it.

x264 HD Encode - 2nd Pass

Windows Media Encoder x64 - Advanced Profile

Cinebench R10 - Single Threaded Test

Nano's single threaded performance is really where it shines vs. Atom. You get roughly double the performance, which is quite visible in normal OS interaction or light apps like web browsing. Everything just pops up a lot quicker.

Cinebench R10 - Multithreaded Test

With a second core at its disposal the new Nano does very well in multithreaded environments as well. Again we have it besting the Athlon X2 3250e.

Par2 - Multi-Threaded par2cmdline 0.4

I ran our Par2 test here because it is highly optimized for Intel architectures. It is a real world test however and it shows you that despite VIA's architectural advantages, there will be situations where even an Atom may be faster.

WinRAR 3.8 Compression - 300MB Archive

In most cases however, the DC Nano will be noticeably faster than a Pineview Atom and within striking distance of an Athlon X2.



Power Consumption

The DC Nano platform I tested is built on an old 65nm manufacturing process at TSMC. As a result, power consumption isn't that great. Also note that VIA doesn't do any power gating, so idle power ends up being very similar to Clarkdale:

Integrated Graphics Performance - Idle Power

Integrated Graphics Performance - Load Power

While the DC Nano platform may have the performance advantage, it requires at least twice the power of Intel's Pine Trail Atom platform. The move to 40nm will definitely help things, but I doubt we'll see Atom levels of power consumption from the final DC Nano platform.



Final Words

It's not hard to beat Atom. The chip was originally designed to be used in MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and aimed at smartphones, but found extra work in netbooks and nettops. Intel has also been very conservative with Atom's roadmap. The chip is still on 45nm while Intel is a little over a year away from beginning its move to 22nm. Atom's architecture also remains in-order, while ARM, AMD and VIA are all presenting if not shipping out-of-order alternatives aimed at similar PC markets.

The dual-core Nano platform offers better graphics performance and better CPU performance than Atom. The Chrome 520 IGP, at times, can even give Intel's HD Graphics a run for the money. The two unknowns are power consumption and price. The former will change as VIA transitions to 40nm, while I couldn't get an answer out of VIA on the latter. Current Nano motherboards retail for around $120, but that's for the single core offering. At 40nm VIA should be able to offer two Nano cores for the same price. If you can buy a DC Nano board with BGA chip for around $120, it'll be a steal compared to Atom and more powerful platforms.

The biggest competitor for Nano may not end up being Intel after all. AMD's Bobcat is due to ship to OEMs before the end of the year, and before the end of the week we'll have our full performance preview of it.

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