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How System Studio 2 sees the processor
According to Sandpile, the 933MHz Ezra is codenamed C5C and needs a measly 1.35V on its 0.13u process to function properly, generating a measly 6.9W peak. 15.8 million transistors gives it a dual L1 setup (64Kb for 128Kb total L1) and a 64Kb L2 cache. 3DNow! support and a full MMX implementation also make it into the core.
However it's not all sweetness and light with the Ezra found in the M-9000. It seems that most 686 class x86 code gleans decent performance by the compiler making good use of the CMOV instruction (and if it's multimedia based code, an instruction like SSE too) found on most 6th generation or later x86 cores like the Pentium III and 4, Athlon XP and other designs. But to save die space and power consumption, VIA decided not to give the Ezra in the M-9000 any CMOV capabilities. Just to clarify, CMOV is Conditional Move, an instruction that jumps to a different code section based on a register or opcode comparison.
3DNow! makes a fully pipelined appearance and the 3DNow! performance is good for the clock speed but SSE is arguably a more popular multimedia instruction set. To this end, VIA's new C3, codenamed Nehemiah, implements CMOV in the core and also drops 3DNow! in favour of SSE. This makes the CPU a much more appealing choice for a system like the EPIA to help performance, lets hope the voltage and power consumption of the new C3 makes it feasible for future EPIA systems. For now however, we're stuck with the older C3 core and its limitations.
Let's see what SiSoft Sandra makes of the 933Mhz processor in terms of multimedia performance.
Sandra CPU Multimedia performance
Not exactly earth shattering performance, despite a fully pipelined 3DNow! implementation. So does the C3 have assistance from any other hardware when doing multimedia based work?
The thankful answer is yes, the CLE266 bridge implements a full hardware MPEG-2 accelerator which the graphics driver takes full advantage of when asked to do MPEG-2 work. That of course means hardware DVD and SVCD playback, something I think the 933Mhz C3 would have problems doing on its own. It doesn't however help in MPEG-4 situations like DivX which means the CPU is doing all the work inside the playback codec.
So how does the M-9000 get on doing what it was designed to do? All the tests were doing using Windows XP Professional as the operating system and the supplied driver CD to set things up. VideoLAN server was used to serve video data, Shoutcast for audio and Winamp and Windows Media Player 8 for playing things back locally.
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