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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.
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.