VIA yesterday began shipping its fastest embedded x86 processor, the Eden ESP7000.

Clocked at 733MHz, the chip is designed for fanless systems, including set-top boxes, point-of-sale terminals and thin clients. It consumes a maximum of 6W of power, but under typically usage situations just 1W.

Based on VIA's Nehemiah processor core, the ESP7000 features a hardware random number generator, the basis for VIA's PadLock data encryption system which the company is targeting toward manufacturers who need to incorporate content DRM into their devices.

The chip contains 64KB of L2 cache and supports Intel's SSE multimedia instructions. VIA said the part was now shipping in volume. ®