VIA announced today that it confirmed that it would sell part of Centaurus Technology, located in Austin, Texas, to Intel Corporation , priced at US$125 million, equivalent to about RMB 800 million.
, headquartered in Taipei, China, , VIA Electronics was once a big hit in the early 21st century. With its chipset that supports DDR memory, it once made , Intel a headache. However, after Intel's ban and protracted lawsuits, VIA's glory no longer existed and was completely depressed.
However, VIA acquired x86 processor companies such as Cyrix and Centaur at its peak, and designed, produced and sold x86 processors in a factory-free manner.
In 2013, Shanghai State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and VIA invested 80% and 20% respectively to establish Shanghai Zhaoxin Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd. under the x86 authorization provided by VIA, Zhaoxin began China's legitimate x86 R&D journey.
According to the data of the Megacore Gateway, the company's last new x86 processor was released in 2019, with the model being the Kaixian KX-6000 series processor.
From the surface information, we can't see any relationship between Zhaoxin and Centaurus, but I think Zhaoxin's early processor architecture had a great chance of originating from Centaurus.
Nano x86 processor developed by Centaurus
In the x86 camp, VIA is a very weird existence. Its Centaurus team is very aspiring and very capable. However, VIA's own capital and market expansion capabilities limit the research and development and development of Centaurus, which leads to the things Centaurus making are also very weird. For example, the Nano processor code-named Isaiah has a large amount of resources in the branch predictor and has high accuracy, but the processor's front-end delay cost is high, which becomes a design that pursues accuracy and gives up speed.
With the sale of the Austin team in Centaur, this means that VIA Electronics' strongest x86 team no longer exists. Whether Zhaoxin in Shanghai can make an aspiring high-performance x86 processor will be something worth paying attention to.
