VIA offers 'carbon-free' processor

 

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Posted on 14 Sep 2006 at 11:55

Chip developer VIA has come up with a novel way to make people feel good about buying its new processor. The company is offering to 'offset' the amount of carbon dioxide caused by the manufacture and operation of the chip through reforestation, 'promoting' alternative energy sources such as solar power and energy conservation.

VIA says it works with environmental experts to calculate the electricity used by an average Carbon Free Computing product over its lifetime (assumed to be 3 years). Then from the amount of electricity used, VIA calculates how much CO² emissions will be released into the environment mainly as a result of fossil fuel burning power plants, and then works with regional offset organizations to 'offset' that amount of CO².

However, many environmentalists argue that 'offsetting' targets are merely a fig leaf to allow companies to continue building polluting products. While planting a tree to absorb the carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuels may help in the short term, the CO² is still in the carbon cycle when the tree dies and the fossil fuels are better left in the ground.

By reducing the power consumption of the chip, the VIA C7-D at least reduces the amount of fossil fuels used over its lifetime. The company says that the x86 compatible C7-D processor is based on the advanced VIA CoolStream architecture of the 'Esther' core that minimizes power consumption within an ultra compact die while optimising performance. Measuring just 21mm x 21 mm and with a TDP (thermal design power) of around 20 watts at 1.8GHz, the VIA C7-D processor is said to need only minimal active cooling inside ultra low profile commercial desktop designs.

By way of comparison the TDP of the new Intel Core Duo E6700 is 65W. Equally, AMD is said to be preparing a Socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2 5200+ running at 2.6GHz also with a 65W TDP. However, both of these mainstream chips are far superior in performance to the VIA design.

Available at speeds of 1.5GHz and 1.8GHz, the VIA C7-D processor offers StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction, sixteen pipeline stages, support for SSE2 and the advanced SSE3 multimedia 3D instruction sets, a full-speed Floating Point Unit and an efficiency-enhanced 128KB full-speed exclusive L2 cache with 32-way associativity.

Working alongside the VIA C7-D processor, the VIA CN700 Digital Media chipset integrates the VIA UniChrome Pro IGP graphics processor with MPEG-2 hardware acceleration and the Chromotion CE engine to offer users smooth and crystal clear video. The platform also supports dual monitor output with DuoView+, rich 6-channel audio and DDR2 400/533MHz memory.

While little in the performance spec is likely to cause sleepless nights at either Intel or AMD, it is at least a good sign that a company is actually beginning to make some moves to try and clean up the carbon emissions caused by the manufacturing - even though it is better not to generate the atmospheric carbon in the first place.

Author: Steve Malone