Cyrix III: P6 clone by name, but not by performance
PrinttecChannel benchmarks find it lacking on the speed front
Posted in Channel, 6th July 2000 19:53 GMT
Free research: Application platforms, the state of play
VIA's P6 clone, the Cyrix III, underperforms Intel Celeron in a series of 2D applications and Windows 98SE benchmarks, run by tecChannel.
In its review comparing the Cyrix III with a clutch of rival offerings from AMD and Intel, tecChannel summarise performance as "rock bottom: Only the predecessor Cyrix II is even slower. Having a big L1 cache and no L2 cache does not help here".
The German IT site tells us it laid hands on production silicon "from the first batch of CPUs available in Asia. VIA says that the performance may only up 2 or 3 per cent with applications with a special BIOS".
However, the article is no demolition job. tecChannel supplies a thorough discussion of the Cyrix III architecture (or at least the details released so far by Cyrix). It explains the low-power/low price/performance trade-offs, and there is a summary of VIA's Cyrix III OEM prices and sales projections.
You can read it in full and in English at http://tecchannel.de/hardware/431 ®
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