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Via Tech announces buyout of Cyrix
Veck was the first to send us the word that Via Technology (lately of partnership with Intel, as well as being sued by them) has purchased the Cyrix x86 line from National Semiconductor. Despite the huge parity in size, Via Tech seems eager to take on Intel.
Update: 06/30 04:10 by S : To clarify: Via Tech will be purchasing the Texas division
of Cyrix which makes standalone PC processors fitting into standard
sockets (7, 370, and the like). The Colorado division which makes
integrated processors (MediaGX) will be absorbed into National Semiconductor
to address the Information Appliance market. Interestingly
it appears that
Via will also offer integrated products, therefore possibly competing
with National.
WARNING: The following is all speculation.
Intel recently kicked VIA out of the Slot 1 boat because of the 133MHz FSB and gave their competitor ALI the rights to produce the Slot 1 boards. So what is a poor chipset manufacturer to do.. oh wait.. Cyrix is for sale? Aha! VIA buys Cyrix so it can use the cross-license to produce Slot 1 boards again, and gain use of Intel's intellectual property. So VIA will now be in the boat whether Intel likes it or not, and as a bonus they get all the cool integrated stuff Cyrix was playing with. That's my take.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
They already make some good stuff -- VIA chipsets have supported proper L2 caches for a long time -- I have a VP1 that must be 3 years old with 512k on the board and a 512k COAS module, a VP2 with 2MB L2 cache, and an MVP3 with 2MB L3 cache (with a K6-3/400; it would be L2 otherwise). They were made by (respectively) Hong Fen (well, it was $45), Abit, and FIC. All do very, very well. The VP1 supported parity and it has 256MB of parity SIMMs on it (recent upgrade when the prices dipped last year), and the other two do ECC. This is so nice. Remember, this was when the low-end Intel chipsets were limited to 64MB and wouldn't use parity RAM at all.
...), they want to make integrated systems, they have been Linux-friendly to a degree for a while (less so than they could be, but hopefully that will change), and they do not try to artificially segment the market into stupid users and servers (i.e., by not making ECC stock with all shipping chipsets, like Intel)(and like Intel crippling the Celeron's SMP to protect their high end).
VIA has made some good stuff, the MVP4 (look it up) integrates basic video and sound if you want that. VIA stuff has always worked with Cyrix chips (I know that this is more a mobo issue, but
VIA has been a cool company for a while. I will not by a board without a VIA chipset. Cyrix has been pretty cool for quite a while too.
This is good.
VP2 chipset: 2MB
MVP3 chipset: 2MB
MVP4 chipset: 2MB
Cache makes a huge difference. When the PPro came out, I was unamused to see that Intel was shipping with 256k L2 cache. With 256k, the PPro at 200Mhz was as effective as a 166MHz Pentium with 512k on the board, and it cost about 3-4x as much. The usual rule of thumb has always been (IIRC) that doubling the cache is the same as a 30% speed improvement. In my experience, VP1 chipsets with 133MHz Pentiums and 1MB cache would equal 200MHz Pentiums with 512k of cache (which I tested on the same board, pulling the second COAS module out and changing the jumper for the test and using the same chip with 2x as opposed to 3x multiplier). I recall using a Byte benchmark and (I think) Linpack. This was a few years ago, but with a baseline of a 133MHz Pentium with 1MB of cache, the results were basically:
133MHz/512k 35% worse
133MHz/1MB baseline
166MHz/512kb 15% worse
166Mhz/1MB 20% better
200MHz/512k within a few percent of baseline
200MHz/1MB 35-40% better
I haven't tried anything like this lately (the cache has generally been on-board since then), but it really changed my mind, and made me really dislike Intel and Sun for not maxing out the cache. Cache is a good deal and worth the cash, not MHz, generally. Look at the best perfroming Ross boxes -- 1MB cache on 140MHz chips. Look at one of the reasons the PA-RISC kicks ass (HINT: it ain't HPhUX). Look at the benefit that cache gave to the Celeron.
VIA has given us cache and continues to do so. For this reason alone, I will keep buying VIA only.
I do wish that they would release more info and support Linux better, though.