VIA QuadCore Mobile Processor Gets Detailed

Right now if you pick up most netbooks, the best you can hope for inside the machines designed for power efficiency and long battery life is a dual core processor. You generally have to move up to a full size notebook or desktop to get quad-core power under the hood. That won't always be the case though; you can bet that Intel and other firms are working towards getting quad-core processor into small computing devices that run Windows and other OS' that are cheap. One of the companies that are looking to bring cheap quad-core power to netbook users is VIA.

VIA has been offering its Nano X2 dual core processor for a while now. The follow up to that X2 processor is a quad-core offering called simply enough QuadCore. The new processor packs a pair of dual core processors onto the same die. The first time we see these little processors will probably be on mini-ITX boards that come with the processor embedded from the factory according to Tech Report. We don't see much of the VIA chips here in the US, but the brand is popular in developing countries where price is a major concern.

VIA offered up some benchmarks on the QuadCore processor compared to the AMD E-350 APU. The QuadCore had more performance in the SysMark benchmark with 5% more performance than the AMD offering and 28% more performance than the E-350 in CPUMark 99. When tested on the Cinebench R10 benchmark the QuadCore was 100% faster than the AMD E-350. The thing that will limit the usefulness of the QuadCore in some platforms is the 27.5W TDP. That is much higher than the Atom with about 13W TDP and the Brazos parts at 9-18W. Tech Report says expect to see the QuadCore in notebooks with 12-13" screens.

[via The Tech Report]