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AMD Buys Pre-VIA Cyrix Media-GX Division
An anonymous reader writes "A long time ago, in what feels like a different universe, Cyrix created the first sub-$1000 PC based on a 2 chip solution called the Media-GX. Soon after National Semiconductor bought Cyrix, keeping the Media-GX team and selling the 686MX team to VIA.
In the meantime, the Media-GX team have created the a series of single chip PCs, and a totally new CPU, the GX2. Now National Semiconductor is
selling the division to AMD, which should give it a higher profile and better fab technology again."
Reader jlouderb reminds us of National Semiconductor's Device Girls promotion, "a lame take-off on the Spice Girls," and points to coverage at eWeek of the purchase.
It even has a picture of the Media-GX in there.
For what it's worth, Google is your friend
"single-chip PC".
No.
If you would RTFA, you would see that they are getting into the set-top box market. But why RTFA when you have to post early to get karma right!
Is an AMD K6-III (not K6-III+) 400 MHz 2.0 v processor, on an FIC VA-503+ mother board, which runs a VIA chip set, of course.
In terms of uptimes on my samba file server and NAT box, in terms of working with whatever card I shoved in it (BIOS upgrades for the newer stuff, of course), in terms of working with cheap shitty memory (after slowing the PC-100 RAM to 95 MHz), it just works. I have a stacks of junk Intel shit that works great until I actually wanted to put a Promise RAID card in it, works great until except you can't put a PCI video card in the first PCI slot, it has to be the second, works great except that it doesn't work great. It sucks.
The ABIT KT7 with an Athlon or Duron approached the VA-503 / K6 combo in flexibility. I like those. Above that, getting into the 2 GHz and up boards and chips, nothing stands up to my standard of "working". Anytime you try to do something slightly weird (plug in several USB cards, and use the built-in, to load dozens of USB key chains at once with demo crap to be passed out as doorprizes at a conference, for example) something just doesn't work, you start fiddling, and next thing you know it is 7 pm and you are calling you wife telling her not to expect you in before midnight.
People at work make fun of my bench with 4 VA-503+'s in their ancient AT cases, and my stack of spare 503 boards in cardboard boxes. But they don't complain when I get shit done on time.
I'm looking forward to the next really reliable setup. What I would like to do is discover a cheap mini-ITX with that slow-ass VIA C3 chip on it that was cheap and low powered enough that I could just have dozens of them, esentially haveing a separate computer for each little task. I doubt it however. It just shifts a lot of problematic issues over to the network configuration.
That's just not true anymore... As of about the P4 days, Intel has been using just as much power, and putting off as much heat as equivalent AMD processors.
In fact, comparing an Intel P4 2GHz to my AMD XP 2000+ was interesting... It looks like the AMD chip gives off less heat, and also has a maximum operating temperature that is 20C degrees greater than the P4. That doesn't bode well for Intel.
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
AMD chips have not generally run any hotter than their Intel counterparts. Occasionally one of the other might consume more power, but they tend to switch order. Right now Intel is quite firmly in the "hot seat" so to speak. Top-end P4's are consuming over 80W of power, while the top AthlonXP chips are only using about 65W of power and the Opteron uses less (though it's exact power consumption is currently undocumented). Back when the Athlon was competing with the PIII, the Athlon consumed more power. Before that the AMD K6-2/K6-III chips consumed less power than comperable PII/Celeron chips, however the K6 chip consumed more power than the Pentium MMX.
In all though, I'm really not sure what AMD is after with this purchase. They already have a line of embedded x86 processors (which DO have a very good use in the embedded market in that they are by far the easiest chips to develop for and can often use a lot of existing software instead of requiring companies to develop their own). They might be looking to take some of the video/sound/etc technology embedded in the Geode chip and add it to their own embedded line. However, AMD has mostly discontinued their line of embedded x86 chips in favor of their new Alchemy line of MIPS chips. Maybe their buying the Geode as a sort of replacement for their old embedded x86 chips but kind of starting that whole division again from scratch? Or maybe they're hoping to glue some of the technology from the Geode onto the Alchemy chips? I don't know.
What, like this?