VIA Technologies on September 13 announced its VIA C7-D processor for desktop PCs, with a power consumption of 20 watts at 1.8GHz. The company claims the power savings from using the processor will reduce carbon emissions and expects the CPU to use to gain adoption in areas such as EU markets where environmental protection if valued, according to the company.
The initial offsets for the VIA C7-D processor are being done in cooperation with Carbon Footprint, a UK-based company specializing in carbon footprint management and dedicated to assisting consumers and business to recognize their affect on the environment. The VIA C7-D processor is based on the VIA CoolStream architecture of the "Esther" core and is designed in the low-profile nanoBGA2 package measuring just 21x21mm. Available at speeds of 1.5GHz and 1.8GHz, the VIA C7-D processor offers sixteen pipeline stages and supports SSE2 and the SSE3 multimedia 3D instruction sets and a 128KB L2 cache, according to the company.