VIA has always been known for the ‘slow and steady’ approach to computing. They might not have the quickest stuff around, but they certainly tend to have the lowest power draw. While we haven’t seen many releases from VIA as of late, they appear to be gearing up for a rediscovered purpose for their mantra – Solid State Storage.

VIA has brought on a company called Tensilica, who make a System on a Chip (SoC) architecture that has been purpose built for moving data around. The system, dubbed the Xtensa dataplane processor (DPU), has some particular math strengths that would be very beneficial if applied to the realm of an SSD controller. For example, the DPU is capable of performing multiple simultaneous table lookups within a single clock cycle. This is handy for increasing the IOPS rating of an SSD, since wear leveling and write amplification are handled by remapping the LBA’s (sectors) to flash memory space. Each IO results in a necessary table lookup, which the DPU can perform very quickly.

 
With the DPU being so efficient at these tasks, it could be run at lower clock speeds and outmaneuver competing SSD controllers – all while consuming less power. We’re going to be watching VIA closely in the coming months on this one for sure.