The x86 Competitor which could have been: Centaur CNS x86 8-core CPU Review (opens in new tab)

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14 pointsjz_3y ago4 comments

4 comments

I'm on a discord with a friend who picked up some of the Centaur haul. It has been fascinating to watch him go through testing with all of the platforms different emulation modes where it pretends to be other CPUs (often needed to get some programs to run properly). It is kind of sad VIA couldn't focus more on funding this team and finally join the x86 competition again.

2000UltraDeluxe3y ago

Via's chips were cool. As in "playing Quake 3 with fan + heatsink removed" cool.

It's a shame their C3 + Savage 4 combo performed to poorly to be a serious competitor; if they'd been a bit faster, subsequent generations would probably have been excellent competitors for the Atom series when the netbook craze hit.

rasz3y ago

>similar to a underclocked Ryzen 1600

in reality its below 2013 Haswell performance clock for clock (as seen in CINEBENCH vs 2.3GHz i7 4850HQ), except it tops out at 2.5GHz while anyone can buy $30 Xeon E3-1231 v3 @ 3.40GHz. No wonder it got aborted in the west and relegated to pretending being homegrown Chinese Zhaoxin CPU. At least Chinese actually got a backup plan in case of full embargo after Taiwan invasion, something Russia can only dream of right now.

bitwize3y ago

Ah, Centaur, also known as having the coolest CPUID vendor ID: 'CentaurHauls'.

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