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CEO of Centaur Discusses x86 Strategy and Linux
An anonymous reader writes "This fascinating interview with Glenn Henry, founder of VIA processor subsidiary Centaur Technology, discusses the founding of Centaur, its strategy and products, and why Linux is fundamental to his company's success. Additional topics covered include: how to produce an x86 clone with a few million dollars and a few dozen engineers; the embedded x86 market, and how it compares to the traditional ARM and MIPS based embedded market; why Centaur doesn't compete with AMD and Intel so much as enable x86 to reach new markets; how Linux is enabling greater hardware functionality; the urgent need for pervasive security -- and much more!"
I've been wondering why some company like this doesn't create a "network appliance" specification for all of us to hack on. It would be nice if I could just go buy a Netgear router and roll my own Linux installation. I purchased a Toshiba Magnia SG10 some time ago when they were a couple hundred bucks during the end-of-life period. For a 566mhz Celeron with an honest-to-goodness hard drive and switch on the back, it was hard to go wrong. I immediately wiped the stock Linux OS and rolled FreeBSD on there.
Wouldn't it be MORE profitable for companies like the aforementioned Netgear to do this? What am I not seeing? Centaur: help us out!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Is an x86 or clone really the best chip to take to markey this way? Linux will run on other processors and the x86 isnt' the best archicecture. There are processors that are more efficient, use less power and can run linux.
Although, I'll admit some of those embedded boards that I have seen are pretty cool and easy to use.
P.S. I know I can't spell. That's why I'm not an english teacher.
Evolution or ID?
if they could take this technology and turn it into a "portable pc gaming console" of sorts(of similiar size and shape to the gba) In the article it states that they can run at 533 MHz fanless with a worst case power consumption of 2.5W. Wouldn't it be neat to create a gaming console(kind of like the phantom pc gaming console, only portable) for this with flash cards being the "cartridge"
Though licensing for the abandon-ware would be a pain. As would trying to standardize the input across a large number of games. But still, it would be friggin' cool to play leisure suit larry while you are bored in class!
I think it is a sound idea to go into the niche markets so to speak instead of just jumping into the fray with AMD/Intel. Everyone has had enough of the SSE2 vs 3dnow! extended vs the new kitchen sink it comes with. Those types of things have no real bearing on markets where companies are looking for solutions that are cheap, easy to deploy and know the company is designing the hardware for their problem. Not the company having to make their systems go on the vendors limited products.
The more competition the better we the consumers are at getting the best products.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
Well, not exactly the same idea maybe but the story is the same as transmeta to me. One good upside to transmeta, they did not start with linux on mind.
I am assuming their product did not make too much inroads into the industry otherwise I would have expected to hear about their products before this time and from 95 till 04, it is anawful long time to stay in hiatus.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
The biggest problem with most hardware is that it is exotic. I'm not talking about PC's, and routers have become cheaper with micto-atx mobos with dual ethernet onboard. Laptops and PDA's are where there seem to be a lack of standards. There are no displays which can be plugged into your PC without special driver circuits. Why not create a LCD that has a standard interface that is compatible with PC hardware now?
If you standardize the equipment, then you will drive prices down, and you won't be stuck throwing out a PDA that has a broken screen, or has eol'd. Just upgrade it.
Centaur is positioned to tap the largest market in the industry- the sub-$400 PC market. Right now Centaur is designing a processor that will run over 2 GHZ.
A 2 GHz machine that is x86 compatible but will it have all those nifty other features that windows can use to speed it up? If not, it would be much slower than AMD and Intel.
Although, the thought of being able to use a chip like that for some embedded app would be pretty neat and pretty powerful because you don't need all the extra stuff that windows uses.
Evolution or ID?
Every other day, it seems, someone is shouting about how their company is finding linux is crucial to their success/business plan/what have you.
I wonder if it's a case of corporate "me too!" or if all the small firms were simply waiting for some large firm (IBM for example) to thumb their corporate nose at Microsoft, before they decided it was safe to do so.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for firms being able to decide who to attach their sail to, I was just wondering why it was taking until now...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I don't know if anyone else noticed, but they apparantly started on April Fools Day:
"We started officially on Apr. 1, 1995, the day the check came in the mail, an auspicious date."
I don't know why, but I found that amusing...
got sig?
The product we're shipping now, the C5P has a top speed of 1.4 to 1.5MHz, today, but the sweet spot is 1GHz. We have a fanless version at 1GHz. We also sell all the way down to 533 or even 400MHz, for low-power applications.
Hope no potential buyers are put off by this - it must be sweet in a laptop, where power conservation is critical. That said, do VIA have a chipset to take advantage of the head start given them by the processor?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I'm very impressed with the vision required to implement a "low-power" entry level "ordinary" pc all on one board... VIA should be selling these by the boat-load... but for those of us who want to use their technology I still see a few remaining strategy issues:
The price of the VIA boards is impressive, however they need to consider system costs... because they are using a less-usual form factor many customers are faced with excessive costs for supporting bits-n-bobs. Many case/PSU combinations are more expensive then the motherboard and processor - and often 5 times the price of an ATX PSU/case... despite the smaller size and allegedly cost saving low-power requirements for the PSU. I'd like to see a partnership emerge to offer entry-level cases (preferably supporting more than 1 PCI card) for a competitive price.
While the specification and price of these all-in-one motherboards is impressive, I can see many applications for these boards with no need for video at all - let alone hardware MPEG functionality. Sure there are boards with low-spec video - but these also take low-spec RAM... isn't there a market for a board aimed at gateway or remote access applications?
Our whole strategy is so close to the, if you will, the fate of Linux. No, I won't
If only they can take all that engineering power and design a decent website...
I think VIAs mini-ITX range of products are really cool. However, I wish there was an equivalent based on ARM, MIPS, PPC (seemingly any kind of RISC) CPUs. Those architectures always seem to beat an x86 of similare performance when low power, low heat production, low cost, small size, etc. are concerned. I care about these things. I don't need a super fast computer, so I don't want to pay more for a chip with a messy architecture that needs more power, needs cooling, and has a large die.
Sadly, the nice, small boards and CPUs that I would like to have are hard to come by, and you pay a price penalty for that. Then, the next best thing is a sort of mainstream x86 line that aims for the same goals, and that's exactly what Centaur is doing (and Transmeta, although they seem to have failed to satisfy even themselves).
So, if anyone knows where to get cheap RISC systems (a few hundred euros tops) in the Netherlands, please tell me.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Check out Ministry Mobile's device. Vaporware?
Thinking of starting a business in Minnesota? Me too! mnsmall.biz
``There are plenty of upsides, and the only downside is the "other stuff looks better on paper" argument.''
It doesn't just look better on paper. A cleaner architecture results in a simpler chip, meaning lower power consumption, cost, heat production, and smaller die size. Those things matter to embedded devices, and thus MIPS or ARM would be a better fit than x86.
What x86 has going for it is that it is much more abundant. The chips are produced in higher volume, making them easier and cheaper to get, it's easier (and thus cheaper) to find programmers who can code for them. It's really all about Worse is Better.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
how to produce an x86 clone with a few million dollars and a few dozen engineers
I just can't understand why more people haven't done this!
Mohahah!
very interesting stuff. I work in the same building as Centaur. They get catered lunch for all the employees everyday, and I get to sit and watch them all eat. i always wondered what that company did
Cirrus Logic EP9301 eval kit.
Instead of getting the X86 into other markets, why not get some of those embedded CPUs into the desktop and server market?
The x86 has served us well, but it's time that old instruction set was retired. They should open up an interface into the RISC core of modern X86 processors. Let us write code directly to that, and eventually the CISC code will die out.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It immediately occured to me that this guy is very good at thinking out of the box. A processor company is not an easy thing to create, especially with a startup budget as low as 15 million US.
Now they have been through 5 major product revisions and are currently shipping 1GHz PIII compatible processors that don't need a fan.
Technically, I'm not laughing. Personally, I'm wondering if I should send him my re'sume'.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Not really. There isn't much assembly necessary on a modern embedded platform.
Ditto. I have only really used asm in two or three places in embedded projects. One is in the initial bootloader. The second is in instances where the compiler won't do what I want. The third is to access special instructions that the compiler doesn't know about (eg, eieio on the PPC). The second and third instances can't mostly be dealt with inline asm and cpp macros, and gcc make this a lot easier if you have access to it.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I am a long time user of their C3 processors.. His quote about the current state of the product illustrates my main reasons for using it:
The product we're shipping now, the C5P has a top speed of 1.4 to 1.5GHz, today, but the sweet spot is 1GHz. We have a fanless version at 1GHz. We also sell all the way down to 533 or even 400MHz, for low-power applications.
To give you an idea about the 1GHz version we're selling today, the worst case power -- not "typical" or "average" power, which other people talk about -- our worst case power is 7 watts, which is low enough to do fanless at 1GHz [story], and no one else can do that.
To do a fanless CPU in a small case, you really need to be under the 10 Watt range. Their CPU's do this nicely. Compare that to 80W+ for current Intel and AMD workstation processors. ( Intel's Pentium M has good power spec's, but it is very hard to find chips & boards for end user purchase. Most Pentium M boards are intended for embedded or industrial use, and are priced for OEM quantities). Add a 2.5" hard drive (at ~ 2.5 Watts vs. 15 Watts for a 3.5" drive) and you have a nice low power Linux server, which takes up very little space and can run almost silently.
I have been using an 800MHz C3 for about three years now. I run it fanless, with a big heat sink in a medium sized case. It has been completely reliable, and plenty fast for my DSL Linux services (WWW, SMTP, FTP, VPN, DNS, NTP, etc.) + LAN SMB services.
...will be Centaur questions.
At the end of the interview, he mentions the crypto hardware they've put in recent processors.
six months after we first started shipping our product with encryption in it [story], we have three or four operating systems, including Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD
This is a really great capability.. hardware random number generation, and ridiculously fast AES crypto (VIA claimed 15Gbps AES. That's probably for on-cache data. But, it's screaming fast anyway).
Then, he give a little teaser about future CPUs:
Our next processor -- I haven't ever told anyone, so I won't say what it is -- but our next processor has even more things in it that I think will be just as quickly adopted by the open source software world, and provide even more value.
I wonder what this will be, more crypto - like public key accel, or a new direction? As an HTPC user, I would like to see some better multimedia capabilities. The MMX/SSE stuff is nice, but it doesn't cut it for the heavy lifting needed for HDTV MPEG2 processing, or WMV HD processing.
It's standard in British English. Companies are declined as plural.
Wins for ultra low power+performance mix.
Unless we are talking about a totally different line here from the Epia's. This looks like it could be it.
But if it's related to the epia's then it's almost worthless. Last time i checked the epia's performance it was had half the performance of a celeron at similar levels.
Your better off with a mobile athlon xp (the 35 watt mobils, standard mobils are the 45 watt) permanently underclocked significantly (to 600mhz-1 ghz or so) and if possible with the voltage lowered for even less electricity.
If you want even less power usage there is transmeta.
Hmmm... Pie...
He is the archetypical hacker, achieving the near impossible with shoestring budget and garage band manpower against all odds.
He is one of the quiet heroes of these days. Companies like Intel, IBM, HP have near unlimited budgets at hand, can afford to waste billions on crappy underachievers or stillbirths like Itanic, and still achieve but a fraction of what Centaur does.
The only gripe I have with them is that they don't put their CPU optimization guide plain up front on their web site so the gcc people can make a better viac3 target. So far, the proper gcc options are -march=i586 -mcpu=i486. And Via should put their data sheets, driver sources and specs on the web just like that, not behind some registration crap. Open source people are remarkably helpful if you don't put stones in their way.
Go, Centaur! Go, Via!
we have the cheap desktops now, like the walmart 200 buck boxes, but does anyone make a *new* laptop that uses this guys chips and a via mobo, and is it under 500 clams brand new? what he says is true, and I'm in that 90% range that what passes for a mid range speed is MORE than enough for my purposes. I don't do gaming or weather modeling, etc. That's the breakthrough and the sweetspot general pricing range I am waiting for, the linux laptop,comes complete and works outta-the-box, including wireless, under 500$, and *upgradeable*. Is this possible now? Say it is, I mean, 3-4 years from now I could replace the whole mobo with whatever is cool then, along those lines, yet alone just swapping in a new cpu, etc. And a REAL battery (or batteries even better, in some sort of standardized arrangement, with 12 volt DC input being standard) in it, I'll tote a couple extra lbs, I don't need a laptop to weigh sub-3 lbs, 6-7 is still quite acceptable, it's the same as the ones I have now. His chip at 7 watts sounds great, and 1 ghz is perfectly acceptable. Heck, even if it had a switch to toggle it back and forth between 3 watts and 7 watts would be nice, as in clocked/not clocked.
Desktops are a different story, you can always swap around parts and do a little drilling and cutting, etc to make anything fit, but laptops are teh sucks for upgrading and working on, more or less, and they are too expensive as they are sold now to change out very often (for me I mean, but bet a lot of other folks feel the same way). I'd get one and use it for my main desktop most of the time then with an external keyboard and my regular mouse and monitor, scrap energy hog desktops, but retain the option of true portability.
To provide evidence for my statement that C3's are extremely weak here is some benchies of the 1.0 ghz c3. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020605/c3-07.htm l
As you can see a 667 mhz Celeron handily beats it.
Hmmm... Pie...
I keep on having to point this out on Slashdot as many people don't realize how bad the performance of a via c3 is. The 1.0 ghz system is often times twice as slow as a 667 mhz Celeron in certain tasks. I'd label this as an ultra low range processor not midrange. I've seen simimlar benchmarks with a 400 MHZ p3 beat it handily. Benchies: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020605/c3-07.htm l
Hmmm... Pie...
evile et AL? i wouldn't want to be won of them.
many are saying they may be a little peaced off buy yOUR insistence on continually overheating the main processors?
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... successfully cooperating since/until forever.
He says noone else can make a 7w 1ghz part? huh? look at the Transmeta Crusoe. It is in the same price range, performs better and has even better low power consumption.
Dear Sir,
YHBT.
Regards,
Rufus T. Harlemberry
I use a 50MHz 486, bundled in a very old Compaq Contura laptop, to power my main home NAT gateway. It runs OpenBSD, and the power supply says it draws 27W (the LCD is disabled, so I assume it's much lower). What Centaur configuration beats this on power consumption?
While the gateway runs sendmail, httpd, and I use pine on it occasionally, it is still tolerably fast (bittorrent seems to slow down the NAT). However, I'm thinking of adding some WiFi components, and I fear that the 486's max performance will be quickly swamped. Most Pentium laptops are twice the wattage at least.
Other questions for Centaur:
They have two models the 45 watt and 35 watt models. They are under $80 bucks and you can stickem in a desktop mobo.
The 35 watt can most likely be cooled with an ultra quiet fan.
I'm just pointing out that this ultra low end stuff. My system is currently 1.5 years old (i've lived without upgrading core components for several years).
Hmmm... Pie...
... the displays. They should be replaceable easy and be sorta standard. But isn't that lcd price full retail? If it was gotten by the manufacturere and sold as part of the laptop system, seems like it could be cheaper, overall. All I know is, whomever comes up with an upgradeable laptop, something that isn't obsolete junk in two years AND can be fixed/repaired/upgraded, around my price range, and preferably running linux from an OEM install so everything "just works", will be getting my business. and I bet they'll sell a lot of them, too, make it on volume.
I know what I want doesn't exist yet, so I'll just hold out then. I have enough for now. Same thing I did with computers in general, I had to hold out until there were used ones that were affordable for me on the market.
cell phones now, something that works perfectly fine =30$
or
wifi AP = 70$
PDAs of various flavors,or music/media machines 2-300$, these are just small computers now, realistically
LCD screens as mentioned=200$
Now that is all retail, seems like they could be combined and get *close* to 500$. I know it's not there yet, but still, it's sniffin distance now, if some company wants to head thataway
If Linux is central to their strategy then there is no need for x86-ness. x86-ness just makes the CPU design that much harder and commoditises their product. The x86 CPU market is very difficult to compete with unless you have something special to offer. You need fresh high speed/high margin devices every few months to keep alive. It would seem these folks are dumpster diving and trying to produce a lower price CPU to fill the bottom end. A difficult thing to do when old Pentiums etc could be pressed into service instead.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If what you want is a working 380 laptop there ya go. Why anyone would want such a dead end machine, though, is beyond me. At least the relatively power hungry 600 can be upgraded to nearly 1GHz and a good bit of ram using standard parts... those old 3 series are just... portable i-openers: underpowered, but "too good to throw away" only because they have a reasonably high quality, portable display.
You could hop over to one of the surplus dealers and replace that raggedy pp200 with a box at least five time faster - I see 500-600mhz PIII machines go out the door all the time for $99.00. If an upgrade to five times the performance you are getting now isn't even worth a hundred bucks, then you simply don't count. You may have found it "refreshing" to read about a ceo who isn't hyping clock speed above all, but in the end you don't matter to him or the industry because your money never makes it up the food chain. You're not "the type" he's trying to reach because you obviously don't consider even a $300 laptop or $99 desktop a worthy upgrade - so when would you ever appear on his radar? Five years after, when the machines are so antiquated they're not even worth freight charges?
I'm not saying this to dis you: I'm also into being a green geek and recycling everything I can get my hands on (thus my collection of old "giveaway" desktops and cheap refurbished laptops). But those Via boards are not designed for sub-$100 desktops. At best they'd make a sub-$300 desktop, and you can buy machines right now that would trounce such a low end machine for much less than $200 on the surplus market. And you wouldn't be generating any new pollutants (except the packing materials and the fuel for shipments) with the surplus system.
So, are you really sure you're "the person he was thinking of?"
You can buy 500mhz laptops for under $300 if you're patient with your bidding and expect to do a bit of parts swapping. And yes, if you buy the right systems you'll find a machine that is very well upgradeable just by swapping a few parts. My own portable pet is a 500MHz PIII frankensteined from no less than three previously dead machines (only one of which is now still dead). I do this all the time and my only concession to new is to buy a new hdd (if needed) since brand new (warranteed) 20gb drives are only about twice as expensive as worn out 4gb drives.
You can do exactly what you're wishing, but you can't do it with new boxed parts and a three year warranty. If you want new then you got to get out the cleaning materials and spray paint and create!
Your construction
smells of corruption
I manipulate
to recreate
in this air
to ground saga
gotta launder my karma...
If pocket PC/zaurus modding is what you want check out Gumstix.com. It's an intel XScale processor 200 or 400MHz with 64Mb ram. It's ultra tiny but still really, really new [they only started in January!] And it runs Open Source Linux installed right out-of-the-box!!
They really are dog slow. They've gotten better with the new 1.2GHz ones they're about equivelant to a 900MHz P3. Their claim to fame is that the whole board only uses 10-15 Watts...at 1.2GHz. True intel makes underclocked mobile Celerons that are blazing fast, but still not that low power. And that intel chip cost more than an entire Via Eden motherboard!! The via boards are tweaked for Fun projects. And they run cool so you can put them in many places you'd never put a normal motherboard. Many come with options to run on BATTERIES or DC power. Try that with a normal PC!
--I've dropped coin on computers before, new and still expensive used, just so happens this is my favorite one of the dozen or so scattered around the room right now, although at best any of them are pentium 2s, 333's, 400s, etc. It is not the fastest clock speed, but it is the most *reliable* one of the bunch and I have had it the longest and it's just comfortable. Can't explain it any better than that-comfortable. I don't know why either, but it is. I have some dells, compaqs and various flavors of whiteboxes. My last brandy new one-a mac- though took a direct lightning hit on the line right outside, and was damaged severely, even through the surge protector. It still ran kinda sorta but I scrapped it. I really liked that machine. Since then I dropped almost a grand on a used laptop, then decided that was ridiculous to keep doing that every year or two, decided to wait a few years before getting another, so I have.
/me goes over to compost pile for visual and olfactory inspection, to see if it's cooked enough to use in the garden. heh heh heh. Stuff like that. Not to mention what goes INTO said alleged compost pile. Joe office worker with the 2.3 lb laptop would be going WTF? and EWWWWW!
I'm just going on a real rough rule of thumb in pricing, laptops were/are always around double the price of desktops for some *rough* similar numbers. To me, that means laptop prices are not dropping as fast as desktops, probably because they have a corporate mindset different criteria of shooting for the lightest weight and thinnest cross section, etc. That's a guess though. I keep reading bitch after bitch about laptop battery life, when the solution is still therte, just put up with a weight that was normal a few years ago, and pout in bigger battery or batteries, but no one is doing that. increase electrical demand, drop battery size, pray that modern battery tech works enough people won't return the machines after using them one day. I think that's nuts, but it's not my call there. I don't know what happened to people they lost strength or something, an extra 1 or 2 lbs seems to be so important people will pay an extra 500$ or something for that.. I'm a blue collar worker, so I guess that's why I don't understand it, that seems so trivially light to me, I'd much rather have a big large amp hour decent battery, and I think most users and corporate types aren't laborers, so to them that is too heavy or something. I'm not trolling or anything,or putting anyone down, just guessing as to the market demand. the mindset that goes to that market demand is totally alien to me, I admit that. I just never understood being afraid of any slight physical exertion,like carrying a laptop that is 2 lbs heavier here and there between airconditioned office and car and coffeeshop,but then paying money to go to some workout club is all. To me it's silly, but to each their own, I certainly do some silly stuff, ow what would appear totally silly to some urbanite, that's for sure. Same with cell phones now, almost all the new ones I see are useless, i don't like them, because they are TOO small, I can't see the screens or use what passes for a keyboard. It's called geezer eyes. And back to urban/rural silliness, heh, yep, just thinking about it. I can poke fun at meselfs too.
%^)
I still think there's a good market for a real low watt/low power needed but "good enough" set of specs with a cheap laptop, especially if they weren't as concerned with the weight and put beefy batteries in the thing to get run times up where they should be, ie, at least a full working day-8 hrs, plus a smidgen. I don't know how hard that would be to pull off, but I bet it would be MUCHO easier if they weren't as concerned with lightness and "looks" and thiness.
Like I said, there's a ton of high end powerful and expensive options, but a dearth of NEW low end options that are good enough and cheap enough at the laptop market. I no longer see any reason for having computers be obsolete every year, and like I said, I don't "game",
Anyway, the $499 "laptop" that fits your description has been on the market for quite a few months now. You can still find them if you look around - the base unit has 128MB RAM, a 1.1ghz celeron, four usb2 ports, ser, par, video and tv ports, and a 10gb hdd. All units come with a 14" LCD of, I believe, 1280x1024 resolution. I've seen them on special once or twice with windows at that price, but more often than not XP is another $80 upgrade away, so technically you might consider it a $579 new laptop... but still, that's awfully cheap for a unit with so many expansion possibilities.
So... how many people do you know who have one? When was the last time you read about one? If there were a hot market for something like this then you'd think it would be all over... but it ain't.
On the flipside of that, a stinkpad is built like a tank even if it only has a puny little 13.3" display of 1024x768. And I don't believe you can get a cpu of 1.1ghz (at least not for the 600 model) - but then again since you can get a "real" PIII cpu for less than the price of a new battery pack 750mhz is probably just fine in comparison. I can handle wireless with a usb dongle or a buscard and I could even stick a 5gb hard drive in the other slot if I were so inclined which would reduce power consumption and give me an empty hard drive bay to store a tiny four port usb hub. And when I drop my thinkpad and the display cracks or I lose a few keys off the keyboard it'll cost like $40 to fix - as opposed to just trashing the $499 "new" model when something breaks because none of them even survived long enough to make it to the surplus market and the anonymous chinese manufacturer isn't around anymore to support it.
That's the competition. That's why there's no one jumping at the chance to deliver a $500 uber-laptop: because a perfectly good laptop of similar performance can be had anywhere now, today - and with new models from brands like gateway and dell and ibm going for less than $1000 today, that no-name "good enough" $500 laptop is going to have an even harder time competing next year.
Is it technically possible to put a small FPGA on the same chip as a regular processor? That would help multimedia "and other things"...
Hey eventually DNA code will die out too and those who are left will all speak Esperanto.
;). Or Itanium, which isn't RISC nor that elegant either.
;).
Sure there's always something better, but it may only be better for _now_. Meanwhile there's something that works well enough and has a proven track record. BTW if Centaur vanishes, one could resort to AMD or Intel, without too much pain.
So far, most of the RISCs and other "elegant" CPUs have ended up embedded or buried. You have Sun, which is having obvious trouble with SPARC. So it's either x86 or IBM's POWER which isn't really RISC, more a RISC-like CISC or a CISC like RISC whatever
High end CISC performs better in many real world cases, coz memory, buses, disks etc are slower than modern CPUs. Treat CISC as compressed RISC. Given that hardware is so fast, might as well "compress/decompress" your RISC instructions on the fly. Which is kind of what happens with say AMD, or even IBM's POWER chips.
The popular embedded CPUs (ARMs etc) aren't that fast. And the stuff Centuar is adding to their chips may make the makers of network appliance equipment (VPNs/firewalls/content filters/IPS) quite interested.
Now if/when they do 3DES fast too, things will get interesting. Coz normally at a product/buyer level, hardware VPN accelerators are typically a few thousand USD or something like that. With a Centaur chip - the new products may be using a cheaper CPU, and still have VPN/SSL acceleration... Wonder if some will get tempted to just have VPN acceleration "license keys" and profit even more
Intel has been trying to get rid of the x86 too, but...