VIA Technologies unveiled its new VIA Eden-N microprocessor for networking, entertainment and communication applications at Microprocessor Forum today. The company claims its chip consumes only up to 7W at 1.0GHz and is a perfect solution for loads of devices because of native security engine as well as low power consumption.

The new Eden-N microprocessor inherits the Nehemiah architecture found in the most CPUs VIA announced in 2003, including C3, Antaur and Eden products. Its substantial difference compared to the predecessors, besides its lowered power spending, is the size of the package – only 15x15mm. Other micro-architectural characteristics of the chip remained unchanged from other VIA brethren.

Thermal Design Power of VIA Eden-N processor at 533MHz, 800MHz and 1GHz is just 4W, 6W and 7W respectively. VIA claims that its Eden-N is the world’s lowest power consumption native x86 processor. The original Antaur processor based on the same architecture and clocked at 1.0GHz consumed 11W of power, I reckon.

The Eden-N processor is based on the CoolStream architecture also known as Nehemiah. It utilises rather deep 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. Additionally, it features VIA’s own PadLock Data Encryption Engine, a hardware security feature.

Like all VIA’s microprocessors for this kind of applications, the Eden-N will have to function with VIA CLE266 chipset that boasts with PC2100 memory controller, MPEG-2 decoder, 5.1 audio, USB2.0 and 10/100Mb/s Ethernet controller.

General prospects of the VIA Eden-N CPU and supporting platforms do not really impress me much in spite of the fact that the Eden-N is targeted on an emerging market. VIA has been making low-power solutions for quite some time now, but its x86 market share did not uptick. Given that from pure technology point of view everything seems to be just fine, VIA’s hardware may have some unpleasant peculiarities, while VIA’s marketing cannot convince a lot of solutions manufacturers to utilise products from this company. Even though VIA has a lot of partners in the field of low-power devices, these are minor players and they can influence neither VIA’s market share nor VIA’s sales that have been declining for a couple of consecutive years.