Via announces low-powered quad-core processor

Chipmaker Via has announced an x86 quad-core processor that draws a very small amount of power.

The Via QuadCore processor, announced on Thursday, has a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 27.5W, which Via says makes it the lowest power quad-core processor on the market.

For perspective, the lowest TDPs available on Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture four-core i5 and i7 processors are either 45w or 82w, respectively.

"As a result of the rapid proliferation of high-definition multimedia content and increasingly demanding multithreaded applications, a four-core processor is the new baseline for today's mainstream PC user," Epan Wu, head of processor platforms for Via said in a statement. "The Via QuadCore processor meets that need with the industry's most power-efficient architecture."

The Via QuadCore runs at 1.2GHz per core and is designed for desktops, notebooks, micro-PCs, and lightweight miniature servers.

Four 'Isaiah' cores are combined on two dies to form a quad-core processor that is natively 64-bit compatible, has a 4MB L2 cache and a 1222MHz V4 bus and is built using a 40nm process.

The processors will begin shipping in the third quarter of 2011. Prices were not available at the time of writing.

In the past, Dell has shown off servers based on Via's Nano processors, which use a comparatively small amount of power due to Via's energy-saving chip architectures.