by FastSite
08/03/2000 | 12:00 AM
A lot changed in the world of low-cost CPU manufacturers last year. Mostly the changes were caused by the growing interest in the sub-$1000 PCs. As a result, Intel with its low-cost Celeron family managed to spoil the life for all other cheap processor developers and manufacturers. And when an even cheaper Timna CPU became more than real, smaller companies simply had to lay down their arms. Among those were Cyrix and IDT, which stopped their work, and Rise, which was planning to switch to a different kind of activity.<%BANNER[article]%>
However, Cyrix and IDT's achievements weren't wasted for nothing. VIA, a Taiwanese company, which had had a really rich experience fighting with Intel in the chipset market, behaved very dynamically and purchased Cyrix and IDT together with all their intellectual property. So, VIA got two independent CPU developer teams at its disposal with nearly ready projects of Joshua and Samuel processor cores.
The first one to come out in spring was planned to become Cyrix CPU built on Joshua core. However, Cyrix failed to meet VIA's expectations about its CPU that's why this product had never been manufactured in mass. VIA manufactured a very limited amount of samples, which performance appeared really deplorable. That's why the company acted quite logically, having made its mind to wait till summer when a new Samuel would be ready.
And so finally the world saw the first VIA CPU, called Cyrix III (VIA considers Cyrix brand name to be more well-known that's why they decided to use it for their chips) and built on Samuel core. Here are its main features:
So, VIA is going to position its Cyrix III as a low cost CPU with quite acceptable performance for Value PCs, notebooks and Internet appliances, etc. In other words, Cyrix III will be mostly aimed at those applications, which do not require super high CPU performance. This is exactly why Samuel developers decided to give up L2 cache at all. As a result, the CPU manufactured with 0.18 micron features a very small core and hence dissipates very little heat. Moreover, it also supports high working frequencies, which is also a plus. And taking into account a relatively big L1 cache, 128KB, the performance drop cause by the absence of L2 cache shouldn't tell that much.
In general, Cyrix III owes nearly all its advantages to a small core, which is almost 30% smaller than that of Intel Celeron. The first worthy advantage is low cost of Cyrix III, which makes it more fit for sub-$1000 PC market. For instance, a 500MHz Cyrix III will cost about $50 only. Cyrix III is also not very power-hungry. It consumes only 10W, which is 60% lower than Intel Celeron does. And the already mentioned low heating of this CPU allows using it without the active cooling (just with a heatsink) and also in the cases of really small devices, such as Internet appliances, for instance.
Since Cyrix III is designed for Socket 370, it can be installed into any Socket 370 mainboard available in the market. However, this processor should be supported by the mainboard BIOS otherwise you will be unable to use it. Not all the mainboard manufacturers have already prepared BIOS updates with Cyrix III support that's why it will work not with every mainboard now. During our tests we tried several i815 based mainboards, however, our Cyrix III failed to work properly in all of them. But as soon as we took a mainboard on VIA Apollo Pro133A, the situation improved in a very funny way. Though the mainboard understood Cyrix III as Celeron, it still worked nicely. Anyway, the compatibility problems should be solved in the near future, so let's wait a bit.
As far as the overclocking potential of this CPU is concerned, the CPU should theoretically overclock quite well due to low heat dissipation. However, VIA locked the CPU clock multiplier that's why we doubted if we would manage to achieve any interesting results. So, we overclocked our VIA Cyrix III 533 with 133MHz FSB only up to 600MHz having increased the FSB frequency up to 150MHz. Therefore we suppose that we could have made a much greater progress if it were not for the locked multiplier. As for the 500MHz version with a 100MHz FSB, it naturally looks much more attractive for overclocking purposes.
And now let's start our tests. The testbed was configured as follows:
Besides the CPUs working at the nominal frequencies, we have also included the results for Cyrix III overclocked up to 600MHz by means of increasing the FSB up to 150MHz and the results for Intel Celeron with the disabled L2 cache.
First of all we will take a look at the performance shown by our hero in synthetic benchmarks and then we will pass over to real applications.
This test shows the performance of the CPU integer unit and data processing speed. To tell the truth, Cyrix III can't boast much here. It is probably the absence of the L2 cache that tells. And even a 133MHz FSB, which Celeron CPU needs so badly, can't save the situation. Although the overall slowness of the processor influences the results, Cyrix III and Celeron with L2 cache disabled run neck and neck. But this is just the beginning.
And in FPU WinMark Cyrix III performed on a really deplorable level. This test shows "pure" CPU performance of the arithmetic coprocessor. In fact, our hero appears nearly three times slower than Intel Celeron CPU, which is pretty disappointing, of course. IDT developers seem to have failed to create a fast arithmetic coprocessor, which has long been their primary task.
This benchmark included into 3Dmark2000 shows theoretical CPU performance in typical gaming 3D scenes when SSE and 3DNow! SIMD instructions are applied very actively. As we have already mentioned, Cyrix III supports 3DNow! instructions set, while Celeron 533, which we have also included into the tests doesn't support any SIMD instructions at all. Nevertheless, Celeron manages to leave Cyrix III far behind once again. In fact, Celeron owes part of its victory over Cyrix to a faster FPU, though the main reason of Cyrix's failure is a very slow 3DNow! set.
So, having analyzed the performance shown by the major units of a new VIA CPU we arrived at the conclusion that this CPU is absolutely unfit for games, which require fast FPU and SIMD-instructions. However, we hope that Cyrix III will prove better in office applications with integer operations and especially in Internet applications.
Well, let's look at a bit of practice:
Again Cyrix III is not the fastest and falls behind Celeron working at the same frequency by nearly 33%. Though we didn't expect anything else, actually.
These results are nearly the same as on the previous chart. However, let's find out the applications Cyrix III copes with most efficiently.
Best of all Cyrix III performed in Netscape Navigator 4.61, Corel Paradox 9, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 and Microsoft Word 2000. Here it even catches up with Celeron. And in MetaCreations Bryce 4, CorelDRAW 9, Avid Elastic Reality 3.1, Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe Premiere 5.1 and Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 4.0 Cyrix III suffers a really noticeable defeat: it performs almost twice as poorly as Intel Celeron does.
Well, it's high time we devoted a bit attention to games. But the results proved not very high, which we had, actually, expected. In Quake3 for instance, this CPU falls behind Intel Celeron by nearly 50%, because of the slow FPU. Well, not very consoling, anyway.
As for Unreal Tournament, Cyrix III looks a bit better compared to Intel Celeron. However, the difference, which makes 14-15fps at 640x480, is hardly a very good result. So, it looks as if Cyrix were unfit for gaming as well.
And again Celeron is nearly twice faster than Cyrix III.
Well, Cyrix III has the following typical features:
So, Cyrix III has every chance to occupy the market sector aimed at low-cost office PCs, especially bearing in mind that it is designed for Socket 370. We really doubt that it will find any other application. However, VIA isn't going to stop here and plans to launch another CPU on Samuel 2 core in Q1 next year. The new CPU seems to be deprived of quite many drawbacks of its predecessor. Samuel 2 is supposed to have a 64KB L2 cache and a slightly modified FPU unit, which should catch up with that of Celeron in terms of performance.