Centaur Tech Announces Eight-Core x86 SoC With AI Coprocessor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Centaur Tech Announces Eight-Core x86 SoC With AI Coprocessor

VIA-owned Centaur Technology has finally announced their newest project past the decade old VIA Nano... Centaur Tech is rolling out an eight-core x86 SoC that features an integrated AI coprocessor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Centaur-8-Core-x86-SoC-AI

[microcode]

Wonder where they got that IP.

[onicsis]

[Veerappan]

Holy smokes... Via/Centaur is still alive and making new CPUs.

I had honestly written them off at this point.

[Adarion]

Interesting.
Well, I'll have a drink of my choice meanwhile I wait for this to actually happen. This still is a paper launch and VIA often announced thing that later... well, didn't come to be as intended. See all the past with their GPU side of things.
Anyway it will be interesting to have a third option back, be it even just to fill ... a non-existent gap.
Years ago the low power segment was the place to go, since they couldn't beat AMD or intel on the speed race. But their low power Mini-ITX C3/C7 + ASICs filled a gap for HTPC, file servers (today known as NAS), office computers, little surf stations (back in the days Java Script wasn't _such_ a pain as today) and so on. Today we have Kabinis, Temash G-xxx and R series and Atoms and Celerons and ARM boards.
But maybe, very maybe, they'll manage to have something without fTPM (aka ME or PSP). Would be nice.

[ms178]

Let's see if it can play Crysis.

I guess Via will compete on price/performance for a specific niche with this effort. The clockspeed might be good enough for their target market and TSMC's 16nm should provide very goog yields by now. But that process is not exactly the latest and greatest and we don't know yet what their architecture is capable of. The competition does not stand still though and it is not just about the hardware, but the software side of things, too. Getting an AI accelerator on the package might be a possible next step for AMD's server efforts, too. If they had GPU chiplets already they might have come up with something like that first.

[schmidtbag]

Holy smokes... Via/Centaur is still alive and making new CPUs.

I had honestly written them off at this point.

Not just that, but a CPU that isn't obsolete before it's released. Sure, it isn't impressive but those specs certainly aren't bad.

[willmore]

Sounds like a nice chip to go up against those little Xeon D chips that Intel charges so much for.

[Chugworth]

VIA is still using the Centaur name for processors? Centaur was a separate company from Cyrix that VIA bought around the same time. In the late 90's they made the IDT WinChip processors which were very cheap, but horrible, horrible.

[edwaleni]

Sounds like a nice chip to go up against those little Xeon D chips that Intel charges so much for.

Would be interesting to see how close in feature set they come out with. Probably no HT and no VT-x.