The new queen of VIA Technologies’ x86 chip lineup is Esther,
also known as C5J. Built on IBM’s 90nm SOI process, the processor
is said to consume just 3.5W at 1GHz. Esther will come with 128KB L1
and 256KB L2 caches, an 800MHz bus, and SSE instruction support. The chip is
expected to scale up to around 2GHz. As the NX execution protection ship
leaves the dock, VIA is hopping on board, and bringing further
enhancements to its PadLock security package, such as features for
secure hash (SHA-1 and SHA-256) algorithms, and RSA encryption. Svelte
as she may be, Esther certainly won’t be short on power.
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