A Chip off the Old Cliché

The low-cost processor market is continuing to get crowded, and the latest processor release from Via Technologies is set to make that market even more competitive. The CeBIT trade show in Germany was the launch site of Via's latest design, an

The low-cost processor market is continuing to get crowded, and the latest processor release from Via Technologies is set to make that market even more competitive. The CeBIT trade show in Germany was the launch site of Via's latest design, an enhanced Cyrix III with clock speeds ranging from 750- to 850MHz.

Now the Cyrix is certainly not a performance processor, but it does what it does at relatively cheap cost - and performance isn't everything (giggle, yeah right - ed). The new processor packs in 64KB of Level 2 cache and supports same Socket 370 architecture of the more popular Celerons. The enhanced Cyrix III is also smaller than its brethren, with a die size of only 52 square mm thanks to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's 0.15 micron process.

Via has also announced its roadmap for the next year. Expect to see even more powerful versions of the Cyrix III built with smaller die processes, and possibly as fast as 1GHz. Via also has a team working on a completely new design, so far codenamed C5X, with 256KB of L2 cache, Intel's SSE instruction set, and running at speed sup to 1.2GHz.
Via Technologies