VIA yesterday introduced its CoreFusion platform, which it hopes will form the basis for a new generation of LCD-equipped home entertainment PCs.

CoreFusion, codenamed 'Mark' combines the 1GHz 'Nehemiah' C3 core VIA introduced in January with the company's ProSavage CLE266 North Bridge, all on a single chip. Connect it to S3's UniChrome AGP 8x graphics core and you have, says VIA, the idea foundation for low-power, small form-factor systems for home entertainment applications.

Such products are expected to appear during the second half of the year, says VIA, which demo'd a concept system, the StarHub PC/TV, at CeBit this week.

CoreFusion also ties in to VIA's VT8235 and VT8237 South Bridge chips, which bring USB 2.0, 100Mbps Ethernet, ATA-133, Serial ATA and six-channel surround sound to machines like StarHub.

The C3 core contains 64KB of on-die L2 cache and operates using a 16-stage pipeline. It's the first x86 CPU with a hardwired random number generator, which powers the chip's PadLock data encryption engine. The C3 also supports Intel's SSE multimedia-oriented instruction set.

CoreFusion is priced at around $75 in 1000-unit quantities. ®