VIA to make a gaming cpu?

[Looney1a]

Wierder things have happened. Do you think it is possible for their cyrix to become good enough to take on the P4 and the athlonXP/hammer? Just curious of what all you think.

Looney

 

[aircooled]

I'm all for more competition. But if past history tells any story, it's that cyrix/via just cant do it. The only thing they had going in the past was price, and now you can get a 1600+ for a little over 50 bucks.

 

[Torghn]

It would be though, but not impossible.

 

[RanDum72]

Back in the days of the socket 7 CPU's, Cyrix was actually the fastest, clock-for-clock. Its only weakness was its FPU and this continues to this day. But today's VIA CPU is based more on the Centaur core rather the Cyrix and the Centaur CPU's had very weak integer units. Coupled to an already weak FPU and you have a dog-slow CPU. They should have kept the Cyrix core and improved the FPU.

 

[AnAndAustin]

Even in the S7 days the Cyrix chips were little more than 'value CPUs' with higher mhz than their perf showed ... much like the P4 there then LOL!

The current C3 type CPUs are laughable, sure they run cool but then so does an Amiga 500! The 1ghz version only had perf about equal to a Celeron 550mhz IIRC and wasn;t even powerful enough to decode a video stream, something AMD and Intel CPUs have been able to do since 500mhz days.

I agree that there is no longer a mainstream market for these nasty budget CPUs since the AthlonXP are so well priced.

 

[aswedc]

ahh I don't know how many times I've had to explain this....

Via bought two CPU companies, Cyrix and Centaur Technologies. Cyrix was poorly managed and soon after the entire team just fell apart without every producing a product. The C3 you see today is the product of Centaur Technologies lead by Glenn Henry a former CTO of Dell and a small team of engineers. From what I have heard about them they are a very talented bunch and allowed to run basically seperate of Via without much pressure, and it would definately be premature to dismiss them at this point. If they put their minds to it, I think they would have a good chance of producing a very competitive chip, but that just isn't where the focus is right now, its on emerging markets in Asia.