VIA today unwrapped a pair of Cyrix III aimed at the low-end PC and information appliance markets.

At 650MHz and 667MHz, the new chips aren't exactly going to beat Intel's 766MHz Celeron or AMD's 800MHz Duron. However, they do sport 133MHz front-side bus support. Intel MMX and AMD 3D Now! multimedia instruction sets are supported too.

The new Socket 370-compatible CPUs are fabbed at 0.18 micron - the die size is 75mm squared, which VIA claims is the industry's smallest - and feature 128KB of L1 cache. A large L1 cache was always a key feature of IDT/Centaur's WinChip, so it's no surprise that the new Cyrix IIIs are derived from Centaur's Samuel core. VIA bought Centaur last year.

The new chips are priced at $55 (650MHz) and $60 (667MHz) in batches of 1000 processors. They top out VIA's existing line of Cyrix IIIs, which comprises 500, 533, 550 and 600MHz versions. ®