Actually the Via C3 CPU has so poor performance, mainly because Via is a much smaller company than Intel, AMD and IBM, specialised in mobo chipsets. They most obviously don't have the funds to hire a legion of electronics engineering experts like Intel or AMD and therefore the design of their cpu's is monolithic and competely anoptimized. I read somewhere that the Via C3's design ressembles mainly to that of intel 486!
VIA are not poor, they had the money to purchase not just 1 but 2 x86 CPU vendors!
The C3 is based on the IDT Centaur design, it was never designed for speed, it is designed specifically for low power. Designing an x86 compatible CPU is no small (or cheap) effort. The C3 is compatible with the full Pentium 4 instruction set, it even identifies itself as one to the OS.
It is like a 486, it's that way on purpose.
The stuff available internally is only more detailed in you can see the resources that are assigned, so you can guess, but beyond that nothing firm that tells us the technology being used.
It looks like a 970 derivative. It needs to be significantly faster then the current 600MHz P3 and I don't think a G3 will give a big enough difference. Also we are talking a couple of years away by which time the 990 will be nearing and the 970 positively old.
The 980 is expected (and rumoured) to be out next year. IBM have already talked on record about a "consumer POWER5". I expect the 990 will be a consumer POWER6.
However I think this quote on IBMs web site pretty much says it:
According to Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and chief technologist for IBM's Technology Group, the new Xbox technologies will be based on the latest in IBM's family of state-of-the-art processors
