Taiwan based VIA Technologies has announced the introduction of its new energy-efficient multi-core architecture that has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of only 27.5 watts and running at 1.2+ GHz. The VIA QuadCore processor is said to be 21% more energy efficient than the nearest competitor. VIA QuadCore processors combine four ‘Isaiah’ cores on two dies which enables multi-tasking and multimedia performance.

Years back when VIA released their first Nano based processor, which is essentially a 9th generation x86 processor with many advanced features which make it quite similar in ways to the Intel Core 2 architecture.  This super-scalar processor was very mean and lean, but initially came out in a single core solution.  What made this processor quite interesting was that the design was simplified to a great degree, but it still performed at a very high level.  It is said that to nearly 50% of a processor’s transistor budget is dedicated to squeezing out that last 10% of performance.
Well, the Centaur design team behind Nano decided to forego that last bit of performance and just created an architecture which would still have next generation features, but will improve power consumption and die size while sacrificing some of the potential performance when compared to larger, more power hungry processors from the competition.

One could argue that VIA jumped on the low power bandwagon before it was really cool.  Way back in the late 90s VIA snatched up processor firms Cyrix and Centaur, and started to merge those design teams to create low powered x86 CPUs.  Over the next several years VIA was still flying high on the chipset side, but due to circumstances started to retreat from that business.  On the Intel side it was primarily due to the legal issues that stemmed from the front side bus license that VIA had, and how it apparently did not apply to the Pentium 4.

On the AMD side it was more about the increased competition from NVIDIA and ATI/AMD, plus the lack of revenue from that smaller CPU market.  Other areas have kept VIA afloat through the years, such as audio codecs, very popular Firewire controllers, and the latest USB 3.0 components that are starting to show up.

Considering all that, VIA thought its best way to survive was to get into the CPU business and explore a niche in the x86 market that had been widely ignored except for a handful of products from guys like Nat Semi (who had originally bought up Cyrix).  In the late 90s and early 2000s there just was not much of a call for low power x86 products, and furthermore the industry was still at a point where even mundane productivity software would max out the top end x86 processors at the time.

This was a time where 1GHz was still not common, and all processors were single core.  Fast forward to 2011 and we have four and six core processors running in excess of 3 GHz.  There’s also seen a dramatic shift in the x86 realm to specialized, lower power processors. It seems its gotten to a point where the combination of raw speed and pervasive, multi-core designs have become “good enough” for the majority of desktop applications out there.
Certainly there are plenty of workstation class software products such as image manipulation, scientific models and simulations that require more than two cores and faster speeds, but for most users wishing to surf the internet, watch a few videos, and exchange emails, we are certainly at the level of “good enough” for a wide variety of low power/low cost processors.

The Nano has done well, even though VIA only has a small fraction of the x86 market currently.  Apparently it has sold quite well in Asia where cost and low heat production are key in many markets.  The combination of a Nano processor combined with the current VIA chipsets has kept VIA somewhat profitable and stable as a company.  The purchase of S3 graphics to design their latest GPU cores has also proven to be a good combination, as the VN1000 was able to match the feature set and performance of other integrated solutions from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.

International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reports that cost of bandwidth is going down (hope you do not need ITU to know that, anyway). The adoption of internet, usage and global penetration of ICT is on the rise. Costs of entry-level ICT services are lesser by 18% compared to two years ago and broadband cost has dropped by 50%.

Data from ITU’s 2010 ICT Price Basket also shows that relative prices for mobile cellular services decreased by almost 22 per cent from 2008 to 2010, while fixed telephony costs declined by an average of seven per cent over the same period, while the number of mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide grew from 4.0 to 5.3 billion.

Covering 165 economies, it is the only price basket to monitor the affordability of ICT services worldwide. This year’s IPB figures underline the fact that pricing remains a major factor in perpetuating the ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor. IPB results revealed a close link between the affordability of ICT services and national income levels. People in high-income countries pay relatively little for ICT services, while those in the world’s poorest countries pay relatively more.

The key highlights are:

 

• Consumers are paying 18% less for ICT services than they were two years ago

 

• The price for high-speed Internet connections dropped by 52% between 2008 and 2010, compared to a 22% drop in prices for mobile cellular services
  

 

• In developing countries, fixed broadband prices dropped by 52%, compared to 35% in developed countries
  

 

• Countries with the relatively cheapest broadband prices are high-income economies and include Monaco, Macau (China), Liechtenstein, the US and Austria

 

• In 2010, the cost of ICT services averaged 1.5% of GNI per capita in developed countries, compared to 17% of GNI per capita in developing countries
  

 

• Customers in 31 countries – all of them highly industrialized economies – pay only the equivalent of 1% or less of average monthly GNI per capita for an entry-level broadband connection but in 19 countries, a broadband connection costs more than 100% of monthly GNI per capita.

 

• Relative overall prices decreased by over 50% in Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Guyana, Uganda and Austria

 

• Nine out of the top ten countries showing the greatest decrease in the ICT Price Basket value were from Africa –  of them had high values (i.e. high prices) to begin with

 

• While ICT prices are falling in all regions of the world, the greatest price drops occurred in Africa, where fixed broadband prices fell by over 55% and mobile cellular prices by 25%…

 

• …but Africa continues to stand out for its relatively high prices. Fixed broadband Internet access in particular remains prohibitively high and costs on average almost three times the monthly average per capita income