VIA C3 Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

The VIA C3 is an x86 central processing unit for personal computers. It is made by a Taiwanese company, VIA. Although the predecessor to the VIA C3 was called the "VIA Cyrix III," both it and the VIA C3 are based on the CPU design technology of Centaur Technology, makers of the WinChip C6. VIA bought Centaur from IDT.

As of March 2004 the fastest edition currently available works at the speed of 1.4 GHz with a 133 MHz front side bus on a Socket 370 motherboard or factory soldered EBGA on Mini-ITX mainboards. Both fanless and fan-cooled versions are available at 1GHz. Fan cooled versions are available at 1.2 GHz.

While being much slower than x86 CPUs being sold by AMD and Intel, it has special niche qualities which make it attractive to some buyers:

• Relatively low electrical consumption levels, at only 11.25 watts maximum at 1GHz
• Low price
• It produces very little heat for a PC processor, and therefore can be run without a cooling fan if it is underclocked or if it has a suitable heatsink fitted
• It runs on older Socket 370 motherboards
• Available in BGA format for soldering directly to low cost boards

In some later (Nehemiah) versions it also features

• A high speed truly random hardware random number generator
• Very high performance AES encryption in hardware
• A BGA package the size of a 1 cent coin.

According to VIA, the VIA C3 was to be superseded in 2003 by the VIA C4 - a clone of the design of the Intel Pentium 4 processor. The VIA C4 naming was skipped because C4 is a high explosive. Instead VIA has released newer processors under the C3 naming but with internal version names of C5B (Samuel2), C5C (Ezra), C5N (Ezra-T), C5XL (Nehemiah) and C5P (Nehemiah) all of which are still limited to 1.2Ghz, despite the VIA roadmap predicting 3Ghz by Q4 2003.

As of September 2004 VIA rationalised its naming scheme using the C3 naming for the earlier processors (Samuel, Samuel2, Ezra, Ezra-T and Nehemiah), C3-M for the mobile part ('Anataur') and C7/C7-M for upcoming 'Esther' processor cores. Versions of these processors also go under the name 'Eden' when they an be passively cooled and consume under 7W.

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