VIA is still around. They announced a new core with AVX2 support, Isaiah II, around late 2014 but it appears their x86_64 license will run out before it actuall

VIA is still around. They announced a new core with AVX2 support, Isaiah II, around late 2014 but it appears their x86_64 license will run out before it actually gets produced. The situation is really unclear. In 2010 they got a 6-year license extension thanks to the FTC, so it's possible VIA can't actually produce x86 CPUs anymore. VIA is 100% a viable option—they support SSE 4.1, run Windows 10, and their integrated GPUs even run DirectX11 natively¹—except that they compete with Atom, not desktop or even regular laptop CPUs. However, the current (40nm Isaiah) “high-end” VIA microarchitecture is a out-of-order, 3-fetch 7-dispatch wide² superscalar, fully pipelined core. So it should outperform a modern Atom by a decent margin, with only slightly higher power consumption. Apparently VIA is still fairly popular in China (and by virtue of being a Taiwanese company, possibly Japan as well). 1. See e.g. http://www.viatech.com/en/boards/mini-itx/epia-m920/ http://www.viatech.com/en/boards/mini-itx/epia-m920/ 2. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/01/via-cpu-isaiah/2/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/01/via-cpu-isaiah/2/