It seems that AMD’s Hammer and Transmeta’s Crusoe concept to integrate memory controller into the processor’s core has become really trendy. We know that Transmeta  stuck to this design with its TM8000 family of CPUs (to tell you the truth, they were the first company to introduce a CPU with built-in memory controller in TM5000-series) and AMD will implement memory controller in its future desktop and server x86-64 processors. VIA had decided to join this “camp” and introduced at CeBIT 2003 its new incarnation of EPIA platform called CoreFusion (code-named Mark). The new version of the famous VIA’s innovation is a Multi-Chip-Module with VIA C3 “Nemeniah” CPU and VIA CLE266 North Bridge on it. It is not exactly what AMD and Transmeta offer, but, at least, VIA understands the importance of integration.

The core-voltage of the CoreFusion MCM will be 1.25v and the thermal design power of the module will be just 12W. Besides low power consumption, the new EPIA show also be faster than to the old EPIA.

The new generation VIA C3 processor based on the Nemeniah core should offer some advantages in performance compared to the original C3 processors on the Samuel 2 core. The new one features  16-stages pipeline to allow higher core-speed, SSE multimedia instructions, StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction, 64KB of Exclusive 16-way set-associative L2 cache and a full-speed FPU. It also features VIA’s own PadLock Data Encryption Engine, a hardware security feature that is also going to become fashionable in the coming years.

VIA CLE266 North Bridge features PC2100 memory support and S3 Graphics’ UniChrome 2D/3D AGP 8x graphics core with integrated full MPEG-2 decoding, RAMDAC, TMDS, LVDS and TV-Out functionality as well as DuoView support for an extended desktop. The VIA “Mark” CoreFusion Processing Platform can be coupled with a choice of the VIA VT8235 and VT8237 South Bridges that provide support for 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, ATA-33/66/100/133, Serial ATA-150 (for VT8237 only), and six-channel surround sound.

It is expected that the highly-integrated MCM will allow system makers to use 15% smaller PCBs compared to the current mini-ITX boards for the new EPIA CoreFusion platform. Products built around VIA “Mark” CoreFusion Processing Platform are expected to be introduced in the second half of 2003.