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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.
Am I the only one who thought of "Device Girls" as those unenlightened females who prefer various mechanical devices over us virile geeks?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Hey, I wanna know where they are now. Where's the E! True Hollywood Story on the Device Girls? Are they in pr0n, yet? :)
USB Spice
FireWire Spice
Gigabit Spice
mini-ITX Spice
Mmmmm.
Perhaps what AMD wants is not their CPU, but the stuff that they've integrated in with it to create a single-chip PC. In a year or so, we might see a single-chip system based on one of the AMD processors.
I bought a montherboard with a 166+ 686 CPU from Cyrix. It worked better and lasted longer than the Gateway pentium 166 boxes we had at work. Alas, my rommate spilled a pot of coffee on the bugger and it died with a POP, a SNAP and a SIZZLE. From what I learned, there were two versions of that chip. Version 1 overheated a lot, but if you kept it cool it was fine. Verion 2 didn't overheat, but flaked and flaked and flaked until you wanted to beat it with a bat. My sis wanted a box and I got her a $199 PC with a Cyrix MII 333 chip a few years later. Mistake. 'nuf said. End of my Cyrix experience.
AMD will not use the 80x86 division of NSM to create a 80x86 embedded processor. 80x86 chips fare poorly in the embedded market, which is dominated by ARM.
that with a few changes, it would be as if somebody forgot to turn caps lock off.
Does AMD's purchase of low-power technology have anything to do with this?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Don't forget PSpice.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I remember Alan Cox stating that he was using a Media-GX based system to write and test the soundblaster layer for linux because the media-GX was a better fit to the SB standard then any of Creatives then current chips. He reasoned that if he could get closer to the origional standard then most clones would work, and aparantly he was right =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Where are the world's Fabs?
Da Blog
But there's more! it's not just video on the CPU, it's the north AND south bridges! The CPU, GPU, memory controller, PCI controller, and who-knows-what-else are on this bad-boy! I've been wanting this sort of thing for a long time!
I understand that the price will be longer development cycles and raw performance, but there are a LOT of uses for machines based on this type of thinking. Imagine how inexpensive PCs based on this type of thing could get, and how little power they would require! If managers get their heads around the idea of centralized computing again (as they should in the office) we're going to see huge demand for inexpensive fast-enough graphical terminals.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails