Thread: Centaur Tech Tour in image

If you have not read up on VIA’s fresh Centaur planned “CN / Isaiah” central processing unit, you actually should. It is rather an effective component that we will soon see in the UMPC and notebook place doubtless. When we were down visiting Centaur’s offices in Austin, Texas, we were given the complete tour of the facility that is extended out over some floors in a pretty sizeable office constructing hidden from clear idea through a row of dense brush and large trees.


I have been to more than a some factories where processors and other semiconductors are created in the former decade, but the trip to Centaur showed to be complete of many “firsts” for me. Maintaining in mind that Centaur is constructing central processing units up from the plan level to actually trying them in-house is an awesome feat for a company with without than 100 employees.


The one thing that is not finish in the Centaur constructing is the real fabrication of the processor die. VIA has that finish through their partners that recently consist of Fujitsu, IBM, and TSMC. And of course entire production is not finish in this facility either, but most of the “test function” are finish here early sending the component out for last consumer-level production.




Bring together us under on our tour by the Centaur facility, only as we followed along this week. It showed to be rather interesting and easily amazing. Centaur created making a central processing unit look simple.


When most companies do not observe they suck, apparently the Austin Business Journal does not imagine that Centaur sucks either, rating Centaur it #6 on the “Excellent fields to Work” list for 2006. Glenn Henry, president of Centaur, wholeheartedly showed that maintaining its employees happy is a vast cog in Centaur’s complete business philosophy.


Too inner the front door you will search an antiquated PC from the late ‘60s amusingly labeled “Centaur COneA.” Together walls of the office’s chief hallway are adorned with Centaur’s many patents.


Mr. Henry gives us our first appearance at the fresh Isaiah architecture, referred to as “CN” during the rest of our tour. Not only were there large image on the walls, but there were literally functioning examples to found all over try fields that had obviously been in utilize. The back of the CN is depict above and is in a ball grid array form. Recently no designs are being created for a land grid array or pinned CN processor.


Entire initial CN processors will be soldered to the board they are shipped on, much similar to many recent C7-D component. In the last slide above you will observe the processor package with a littler die. The littler die component is a C7 processor construct on a 90nm process. The fresh CN processor is obviously much larger in size while being developed on a 65nm process. The CN has raised to 94 million transistors from the 25 million of its predecessor.