VIA Cyrix III Joshua Launch

Introduction

VIA?

Is anyone else wondering how VIA became a heavy hitter all of the sudden? Just a year ago, we could have lumped VIA, SiS, and ALi into the same group. They were all third party chipset manufacturers in an Intel industry dominated. It's amazing how far VIA has pulled away from the pack in just a year.

Through its recent acquisitions of Cyrix and Centaur, VIA has let it be known that it wants to be much more than a chipset company. It hasn't been easy for VIA, especially when you have Intel trying to hold you down. Let's take a quick look at VIA's past two years.

VIA Time line

VIA on the Attack

We've heard bits and pieces about VIA's new Joshua processor over the past couple months, and we knew what to expect when we attended VIA's official Joshua launch. VIA had divulged earlier that the Joshua was a Celeron compatible Socket 370 processor with an integrated 64KB L1 cache, an integrated 256KB L2 cache, 3DNow! support, 133MHz FSB support, and a 0.18 micron manufacturing process. In addition, VIA had also revealed that the chip would have speeds in the 433 to 500+ range.

We learned a little more about the Joshua at the official launch. VIA is marketing the processor as the Cyrix III. VIA felt that the Cyrix brand was still valuable enough to assign to its new processor, and I think we all can guess why there's a "III" attached to the end. VIA President & CEO Wen Chi Chen also gave an informative overview of VIA and Steve McMahan, Director of Engineering, presented the Cyrix III technical details. After the presentations and the Q&A session, were able to test out a couple machines running on beta silicon.