VIA presents CenTaur, its first LGA processor in 15 years for artificial intelligence

Robert Sole 20 February, 2020

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La Artificial Intelligence It is a market that moves tens of millions and that will continue to grow in the coming years. The development of specialized solutions for the execution of this type of system is evolving by leaps and bounds. VIA they have presented the processor Centaur de CHA architecture with a NCORE AI co-processor. A solution that apparently would have surprised Intel and AMD.

Currently the leading company in the segment of IA is NVIDIA, without a doubt. Intel has already moved token with the purchase of Habana Labs and investing resources and personnel in this company. The Israeli company is known for having some of the best solutions on the market and could catapult Intel into this market.

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VIA creates a processor especially for artificial intelligence

This processor has some characteristics or rather curiosities that are quite surprising. It is the first processor in 7 years of x86 architecture that has not been manufactured by Intel or AMD, which is already an achievement. But it is also that VIA 15 years ago did not launch a socket-based processor. Two very interesting data that could mean the return of VIA to a market that it had abandoned.

SemmiAccurate has had access not only to images of the processor, but also to the construction scheme. One of the interesting characteristics is that it is an LGA chip flip type processor, which means that the processor does not have pins, the socket does. This is deduced from seeing that it has slots to be installed in a socket, something that BGAs do not usually have.

We move to the top, where we see a heatsink that helps dissipate the heat from the DIE and protects it. Below this is a single die, so all the elements have been integrated into a single DIE.

Note that this processor is based on TSMC's own 16nm FinFET lithography. If we look a little more, this processor has a lot of pins, due to the large amount of I / O it has. This processor has Quad Channel DDR4 support and up to 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes, which is excellent.