Box Contents
In common with all EPIA Ms, the Nehemiah M10000
comes with 7 items in the box: The driver and utilities CD,
user manual, floppy cable, ATA-33/66/100 HD cable, an I/O
panel, the motherboard itself and a combo 2xUSB 2.0 and 2xFirewire
module that fits into an empty PCI slot.
Bundled
Software
The included driver and utilities CD includes
FliteDeck
- a package of utilities provided with newer VIA Mainboards.
MissionControl
is a motherboard monitoring tool with SNMP remote monitoring
support. It measures and plots graphs of voltages, CPU temperature,
fan speeds and memory allocation amongst other things, and
has configurable alerts.
FlashPort is a
Windows based application that displays BIOS specific information
and can backup and restore the BIOS to and from a .BIN file.
Personally, we'd rather make a bootable CD and flash using
DOS, but if you really have to use this, restart your PC first
and run it in safe mode.
SysProbe isn't
particularly exciting - most of the system information it
displays is already available elsewhere in Windows in a different
order. Download Sisoft's Sandra instead.
JetStream isn't part of the EPIA M's FliteDeck
release. It's a performance tuning tool available to other
modern VIA boards, not really applicable to the EPIA M.
The Nehemiah C3 CPU
Nehemiah is the next generation C3 CPU, and
features a number of improvements over the Ezra-T C3 used
in all previous EPIAs. It has The 20.5 million transistors,
and uses a 0.13 micron process. For comparison, a Barton Athlon
or Northwood Pentium 4 have about 55 million transistors,
and recent GPUs have over 100 million transistors.
The Nehemiah is designed to work at clock
speeds of 1GHz and beyond - the Ezra-T is designed
at up to about 1GHz.
Nehemiah has a die size
of 52mm2 - the world's smallest x86 processor.
It has been designed to minimize power consumption and optimise
heat dissipation - VIA call this "Coolstream".
Some active cooling is still required, but not very much.
Let's hope for a Nehemiah Eden C3 version.
The Nehemiah features SSE
instructions instead of the 3DNow! instructions featured
on previous C3s. This should bring enhanced performance in
3D applications, which are optimised for more modern SIMD
instruction sets. SSE optimised image processing applications
should also benefit.
Full Speed FPU - the Nehemiah has a full
speed floating point unit for the first time. The Ezra-T
has a half-speed FPU. Floating point calculations are used
heavily in 3D rendering, multimedia, and streaming applications.
Enhanced 64KB Full-Speed
Exclusive L2 cache with 16-way associativity. An exclusive
L2 cache gives a larger effective total cache size as it doesn't
replicate the contents of the L1 cache. The more cache available,
the more chance there is that program loops can run in cache
and not comparatively slow main memory.
StepAhead Advanced Branch
Prediction - Looks ahead and gathers the data needed
to optimally run applications
A hardware based random
number generator (RNG) has been added. This creates
true random numbers from the random electrical noise on the
chip. This is of much use in security applications, allowing
a strong cryptographic key to be generated. VIA call this
the "PadLock
Data Encryption Engine".
Future Nehemiahs will feature IO/APIC
support. An Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller
(APIC) provides multi-processor interrupt management - dual
processor EPIA anyone?
The Nehemiah is available in EBGA or Socket 370 packages -
both are low profile and require less board real estate.
The Apollo
CLE266 Chipset -->