VIA made quite a splash early this year when they announced the Isaiah CPU architecture, which was developed at their Centaur design center. At the time of the announcement, we spoke with VIA's Centaur design center president, Glenn Henry, to get a deeper insight into what VIA had in store with Isaiah, but we weren't given many hard details regarding final clock speeds and specifications, performance, branding, or availability.

Today though, VIA is ready to disclose a few more details regarding the Isaiah CPU architecture. First off, Isaiah-based processors now fall under the Nano brand. Due to their low-power design, VIA's Nano processors will initially be used to power a broad range of thin and light notebooks, but they will also appear in ultra mobile, mini-note type devices and small form factor, energy efficient "green" desktop systems as well.

If you look back at our interview with Glenn Henry, we answer many questions regarding VIA's Nano processors and have an architectural FAQ posted at the end. To reiterate some of what we cover in that piece, the VIA Nano is the first 64-bit, superscalar, speculative out-of-order processors in VIA’s x86 product line-up. It leverages Fujitsu’s 65nm process technology for enhanced power efficiency despite having roughly twice the numbers of transistors as the 90nm-based VIA C7 processor.

Although the chips are being manufactured at 65nm, Nano processors have a larger die than C7, mostly due to the Nano having roughly 8x the amount of total cache. VIA Nano processors have a die size of 7.650mm x 8.275mm, or about 63 square mm, versus the 32 square mm of the 90nm-based C7. Nano processors use the same packaging, however, VIA's compact 21mm x 21mm NanoBGA2 package.

You can read the entire article at HotHardware.