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EPIA MII 12000 Review
Posted on May 18, 2004 Jump to:

The Nehemiah C3 CPU

Nehemiah C3 CPU in EBGA package

Nehemiah is the latest generation C3 CPU, and features a number of improvements over the Ezra-T C3 used in all previous EPIAs. It has 20.5 million transistors, and uses a 0.13 micron process. For comparison, a Barton Athlon or Northwood Pentium 4 have about 55 million transistors, and recent GPUs have over 100 million transistors.

The Nehemiah is designed to work at clock speeds of 1GHz and beyond - the Ezra-T is designed at up to about 1GHz.

Nehemiah has a die size of 52mm2 - the world's smallest x86 processor. It has been designed to minimize power consumption and optimise heat dissipation - VIA call this "Coolstream". Some active cooling is still required, but not very much. Let's hope for a Nehemiah Eden C3 version.

The Nehemiah features SSE instructions instead of the 3DNow! instructions featured on previous C3s. This should bring enhanced performance in 3D applications, which are optimised for more modern SIMD instruction sets. SSE optimised image processing applications should also benefit.

Full Speed FPU - the Nehemiah has a full speed floating point unit for the first time. The Ezra-T has a half-speed FPU. Floating point calculations are used heavily in 3D rendering, multimedia, and streaming applications.

Enhanced 64KB Full-Speed Exclusive L2 cache with 16-way associativity. An exclusive L2 cache gives a larger effective total cache size as it doesn't replicate the contents of the L1 cache. The more cache available, the more chance there is that program loops can run in cache and not comparatively slow main memory.

StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction - Looks ahead and gathers the data needed to optimally run applications

A hardware based random number generator (RNG) has been added. This creates true random numbers from the random electrical noise on the chip. This is of much use in security applications, allowing a strong cryptographic key to be generated. VIA call this the "PadLock Data Encryption Engine".


VIA's PadLock Hardware Security Suite on the C5P die

In addition, the EPIA MII 12000 features VIA's PadLock Advanced Cryptography Engine, which adds hardware based AES encryption to an updated Nehemiah C5P core. We'll take a look at this later.

The Apollo CLE266 Chipset and Supporting Chips -->


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