A look at VIA's next-gen Isaiah x86 CPU architecture

A brand-new x86 processor microarchitecture doesn't come along every day, but today, we have just that. We visited the offices of VIA Technologies' processor subsidiary, Centaur Technology, Inc., yesterday to learn about its new x86-compatible processor architecture. Remarkably, Centaur President Glenn Henry and his team of less than 100 people have created a thoroughly modern x86 processor microarchitecture from scratch over the course of the last four years. The resulting design, which bore the code-named CN during its development and is also known as the VIA Isaiah microarchitecture, is a superscalar 64-bit processor with speculative, out-of-order execution.