VIA fuses C3 and CN400 to give birth to Luke
VIA fuses C3 and CN400 to give birth to Luke
Amidst another bout of furious sweating, I slithered along to VIA's stand to have a peek at what they, and S3 Graphics, were showing off. It's a quiet Computex for the Taiwanese core logic giant, with no product launches to really take note of on that side of things and S3's main public face, the fun-loving Nadeem Mohammed, stuck in S3's Freemont, CA., base. That wasn't stopping VIA's Maggie Lee from chatting to me about VIA's EPIA business, which has recently had a new arrival in a growing family.
In an effort to reduce the number of ASICs and chips you need with an EPIA system, allowing VIA to reduce the space needed and the cost to produce, they've basically put the CN400 northbridge and C3 processor, found on something like an EPIA SP, onto the same package, creating one chip to rule them all. The Luke processor provides everything the C3 and CN400 combo does, including MPEG-4 video decoding and the memory controller for connecting DDR memory. VIA are currently showing it off in a pair of nanoITX designs with the EPIA N and EPIA NL product names.
Maggie says that VIA expect to get them out to market pretty soon. Just as Nick and I saw Baby Luke get born when we stitched PD up to go see Star Wars Episode III the other night, VIA have given birth to their own little Jedi.
