VIA Isaiah Beats Intel Atom in Benchmark

by atticus ~ April 22, 2008

VIA’s Isaiah or Intel’s Atom for the next generation UMPC? From the benchmarks at Eeepcnews.de, it appears that Isaiah 1.6Ghz performs better than Atom 1.6Ghz, especially in the ALU score.

However, according to softpedia, Isaiah will take up 3.5W when operating at full load. Comparatively, Atom will take up 2.5W when running at full capacity. Since battery life is one of the decisive factors in buying a UMPC (or Netbook as Intel likes to call it), it remains to be seen which chip manufacturer will emerge the winner.

Some vendors seem to have already make their choices. MSI Wind and Asus Eee PC are going to come equipped with Intel Atom. I wonder if Everex and HP will continue to use VIA chips in future iterations of their UMPCs. Judging from the scores obtained by VIA C7 and Isaiah in the benchmarks, it would be a nice upgrade to existing Cloudbooks and 2133s.