Centaur, acquired by Intel, was once the “king” in the X86 field

Not long ago, VIA Technology announced that it will sell part of the development department of its x86 processor research and development subsidiary Centaur Technology (hereinafter referred to as Centaur) to Intel for a transaction price of 125 million US dollars (about 799 million yuan). According to information from VIA, the transaction does not involve the sale of the R&D team, but some employees can join Intel at their own discretion.

As a leader in the X86 field, why is Centaur favored by Intel?

The first half of Centaur’s life

From the perspective of the processor market at the time, Intel, with the help of IBM, made them a winner in the PC market in one fell swoop. The success of X86 has attracted architectures including MIPS and POWER to appear in the market one after another, trying to grab the newly emerging PC market. However, due to the strong ecosystem established by X86 and Intel’s iteration of PC chips based on X86, PC chips using other architectures are difficult to match.

But X86-based microprocessors weren’t cheap for the PC market at the time, and Centaur was born in this case.

Centaur, a subsidiary of IDT (Integrated Device Technology, now acquired by Renesas), was established in April 1995 by Glenn Henry, Terry Parks, Darius Gaskins and Al Sato. Founded Qiqi, their business goal was to develop compatible X86 processors, hoping to compete with Intel and AMD at the time by developing processors that were cheaper and lower power than Intel processors.

With funding from IDT, three different Centaur designs ship under the WinChip marketing name. In 1997, they introduced WinChip C6, a competitor of Intel Pentium and Pentium MMX, Cyrix 6×86 and AMD K5/K6. It performs well, but only for applications that use very little floating point math. Its floating point performance is much lower than Pentium. From a price point of view, according to reports, the Centaur-designed C6 is 30% to 60% smaller than an equivalent Intel processor, consumes 50% less power, and is less expensive—the 180MHz version is $90 for 1,000 pieces, And Intel’s price is $106.

But with the release of the Intel Celeron processor, WinChip gradually declined, and by 1999, after IDT failed to meet revenue and profit targets in the highly competitive X86-compatible chip field, he exited the PC processor business and put Centaur Sold to VIA.

Centaur behind VIA

Founded in 1992, Centaur opened the door to the PC market with its system chipset. According to relevant information, VIA’s products were recognized by the market for their good performance and high cost performance, and soon became the second largest after Intel. Chipset manufacturers, and around 2000, surpassed Intel to gain more than half of the market share, and once exceeded 70% in the heyday.

The great success in the chipset, so that VIA began to have an interest in the field of microprocessors. In the late 1990s, VIA began to gradually shift from the integrated chipset market to a diversified core logic business. So in 1999, VIA first acquired Cyrix (Cyrix was a development company established in Richardson, Texas, USA in 1988, mainly engaged in providing high performance for and microprocessors. November 11, 1997 Cyrix merged with the United States), and then acquired Centaur from IDT, which also marked their entry into the X86 microprocessor market.

The same as the original intention of Centaur, Cyrix is ​​also committed to opening up the low-cost market of the X86 architecture. According to Wikipedia, the competition between Cyrix and Intel created the low-end CPU market, reducing the price of personal computers, and Intel finally released it. Celeron processor. And as Cyrix and Centaur are both included in VIA, their positioning in the X86 field has become clear.

Subsequently, based on the IP acquired from Cyrix, VIA named its X86 processor “VIA Cyrix III”, and then launched VIA C3 based on Centaur Technology’s WinChip processor. According to related reports, at the time VIA confirmed that their C3 processor had seized 10% of Intel’s market share.

In 2001, VIA set out the Canaan plan (Project Canaan), divided into four branches, entered optical memory chips, graphics chips, CPU and network chips, and acquired the graphics department of S3 Graphics. VIA’s rapid advances in the microprocessor market caught Intel’s attention. They began a years-long dispute over technology patents. In this process, the third-party chipset market gradually came to an end, and the microprocessor market became the driving force for VIA’s continued development.

In 2005, VIA released the C7-M processor. In 2006, VIA launched the desktop version of the C7-D processor, which was also developed based on Centaur. However, these products were not favored by PCs, so VIA turned its attention to the embedded market. In 2007, VIA launched the Eden X86 processor, which was welcomed by the industrial market, but soon Intel also took a fancy to this piece. market and launched Atom.

In order to compete with Intel Atom, VIA launched the VIA Nano processor based on the VIA Isaish 64-bit architecture in 2008. This is an important milestone in VIA’s growth into a complete processor platform manufacturer. It not only promotes innovation in the desktop computer, embedded applications, mobile and ultra-mobile markets with more product lines, but also promotes the traditional PC market. Replacement.

There is also Centaur behind this processor. VIA has started the research and development of the Isaiah processor since 2004. It was scheduled to be launched in 2006, but it has been postponed to 2008. In March 2008, Glenn Henry, CEO of Centaur Technology, a subsidiary of VIA, said that samples of the Isaiah processor have been shipped to customers in large quantities and are expected to be officially launched in May-June. The Isaiah processor will be produced using Fujitsu or TSMC’s 65nm process technology, and the company is also considering using 45nm process technology.

In the years that followed, VIA’s X86 microprocessors struggled to compete with Intel. Until the end of 2019, Centaur released “the world’s first high-performance x86 SoC with an integrated AI co-processor”, the CNS core. It is understood that its integrated AI co-processor “NCORE” has a core area of ​​about 34.4 square millimeters (17.6%), and the software is mapped as a PCI device, which supports the acceleration of DNN deep neural network creation and training. Up to 20TB/s of memory bandwidth, performance of 20 trillion AI operations per second.

Centaur’s future at Intel

Although Intel and VIA did not describe the Centaur acquisition too much, the deal also attracted the attention of the industry.

The PC Perspective report speculates that Intel may be interested in HPC coprocessors that Centaur’s 2019 launch could add to their existing offerings. Specifically, it’s Ponte Vecchio, Intel’s multi-block hybrid design that will mix cores within a single CPU, which could benefit from Centaur’s work. Intel has said in the past that some of the cores included in the Ponte Vecchio were not designed by Intel, so integrating non-Intel architecture-based HPC coprocessors would be entirely within scope.

The report also states that we’ve already seen some of the Xe HPC accelerators that Ponte Vecchio will launch and Intel’s ability to mix different chips in Alder Lake, making next year’s launch very plausible. It will be interesting to see how much of Centaur’s designs can be incorporated into the new server processors.

It is also worth noting that, unlike the era of microprocessor development, energy saving and environmental protection are a key indicator for today’s processor market. And Centaur has also made some achievements in this field. According to Wikipedia records, the Centaur-based C7-D is a processor with low power consumption. Because it emits less heat, the processor is more suitable for embedded systems and the emerging HTPC market. And VIA also cooperated with Carbon Footprint that year, claiming that C7-D is the world’s first carbon-free oxygen purification processor, mainly in European countries that attach importance to environmental protection. In addition, VIA also introduced the TreeMark logo to highlight the environmental advantages of the C7-D compared to other processor manufacturers’ products.

On the other hand, when microprocessors based on the Arm architecture are trying to grab the market held by Intel, this acquisition initiated by Intel may also help them consolidate the influence of the X86 architecture in the microprocessor market.