When it comes to x86 processors, everyone will naturally think of Intel and AMD, but in fact, there is a VIA (VIA), which has also been prominent for a while, but there is no choice but to spend it.
In October 2020, VIA sold some of the IP rights related to x86 processors and chipsets to Shanghai Zhaoxin for about US$256 million, or about RMB1.72 billion.
In November 2021, VIA transferred some of the business and employees of Its x86 processor research and development subsidiary, Centaur Technology, to Intel for a transaction price of $125 million, or about 800 million yuan.
In fact, in November 2019, VIA's Centaur announced the world's first x86 processor with integrated AI coprocessor, and many indicators are very advanced and refreshing.
The processor was originally scheduled to be put into production in 2020, but unfortunately it was stillborn and did not really come out.
Recently, Twitter blogger Brutus got one at auction and put it through some tests to give us a glimpse of it.
The processor, named "CHA", has been developed since 2016 and uses its self-designed CNS x86 CPU architecture core, integrated AI co-processing unit, and support for AVX-512 instruction set.
Manufactured using TSMC's 16nm process, the core area does not exceed 195 square millimeters, the ring bus connects eight cores in series, 16MB shared L3 cache, four-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller, PCIe 3.0 controller (44 strips), south bridge and IO function, and the main frequency is 2.5GHz.
The AI coprocessing unit, called NCOR, covers an area of about 34.4 square millimeters (17.6%), supports the acceleration of the creation and training of DNN deep neural networks, and claims to provide up to 20 TB/s memory bandwidth, 20 trillion AI operations per second performance, and AI inference performance equivalent to 23 world-class Intel x86 cores.
At the time, it was estimated that its comprehensive performance was roughly equivalent to Intel Haswell's fourth-generation Core.
VIA CHA processor physical: the surface has the Centaur LOGO, 2.2GHz frequency, LGA package.
A dual-socket motherboard: Because it supports quad-channel memory, each channel has eight slots on each side, but it was not used for this test.
Heat dissipation uses pirate ship water cooling.
The GeekBench 5 can detect all sorts of information smoothly, but the strange package format is displayed as Intel's audiophile platform LGA2011, which also has quad-channel memory – is it really a parody?
There were not many test items, only GeekBench 5, CineBench R23 single/multi-core. Considering that the former is actually not very suitable for comparing x86 processors, we focus on the CineBench R23.
Centaur CHA's single-core performance and AMD K10.5 architecture entry-level Athlon II X2 X2 250 (3.0GHz) are on the same level, not as good as the Bulldozer architecture's FX-8150 (3.6-4.2GHz), and less than half that of Intel's Six-Generation Core i5-6600 (3.3-3.9GHz).
After all, the frequency alone is much worse.
With eight cores, the multi-core performance greatly exceeds the dual-core Athlon X2 II 250 and the pseudo-octa-core FX-8150, but it can only be tied with the four-core four-thread i5-6600.
If you look at GeekBench 5, whether single-core or multi-core, it is basically the same grade as the four-core, eight-threaded Ryzen™ 5 3400G (3.7-4.2GHz) of the Zen+ architecture.
In terms of games, Minecraft can start a game that can't be normal, and Tomb Raider: Shadows performs basically similar to the fourth generation of Core.
The power consumption is not high, about 65W.
VIA has left, and can only hope to continue to play under zhaoxin.