VIA Technologies announced its new version of EPIA platform, the EPIA M10000 this week. The novelty is based on the new C3 processor with “Nemeniah” core and is positioned not only for personal computers and similar devices, but also for Digital Video Recorders (DVRs).

Basically speaking, the CPU and more advanced audio-solution are the only differences between the new EPIA M10000 and the EPIA M launched in November 2002. Let us take a look at the specs of both:

VIA claims that the EPIA M10000 consumes 10% less energy compared to the predecessor and generates up to less 50% noise.

VIA C3 processors based on the Nemeniah core offer some advantages in performance compared to the original C3 processors on the Samuel 2 core. The new core features 16-stages pipeline to allow higher core-speed, SSE multimedia instructions, StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction, 64KB of Exclusive 16-way set-associative L2 cache and a full-speed FPU. It also features VIA’s own PadLock Data Encryption Engine, a hardware security feature that is also going to become popular in the coming years.

The VIA EPIA M10000 Mini-ITX mainboard is available in volume for an estimated retail price of US$199 from VIA's global distribution partners.