The Last x86 Via Chip: Unreleased Next-Gen Centaur CNS Saved From Trash Bin, Tested

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A relic from the past

Centaur
(Image credit: Centaur Technologies)

Centaur Technology announced its CNS x86 core back in 2019. Unfortunately, it never made it to the market, officially, at least, because the company was sold to Intel last year. However, Twitter user Brutus recently snagged a Centaur CHA processor from a liquidation auction and put it through its paces. The user's benchmarks provide us with a quick look at what the chip could have been if the project had come to fruition.

For those of you that don't know or remember Centaur Technology, it used to be the x86 R&D arm of VIA Technologies. Centaur Technology had been a subsidiary of VIA Technologies since 1999 before the latter offloaded part of the former's engineering personnel to Intel for a whopping $125 million in 2021.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor, RAM Reviewer & SSD Technician

Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Findecanor
    Consider that the Ryzen 3400G has four cores / eight threads running at up to 4 GHz whereas this chip has eight cores at "only" 2.2 GHz.

    Not an unusual clock for a server chip BTW.
    Reply
  • CRITICALThinker
    I hope that if tomshardware does another article on this they put a bit more effort into their reporting. As someone who participated in the auction with Brutus (he was our man on the ground and will be doing logistics, would never have heard about the auction if it wasn't for him).

    How the hell could a tech reporter ignore the clock speed entirely when comparing performance... It's appalling really. Further information on this article is that the multiplier on the boards is fully unlocked, however we aren't quite sure how it's handled since it's very unpolished. It has booted at 2.5ghz and 1.2v to my knowledge, but like all VIA architectures it unlikely will go much higher and I doubt many people are crazy enough to do much overclocking on such a rare cpu.
    Reply
  • escksu
    I would say it looks pretty decent for a CPU thats ~2.5GHz @ 65W. Single core speed seems slow but I don't think thats running at boosted speeds. If the core is running at over 4GHz, it will be alot close the 6600.

    Of course, its not going to match Intel/AMD CPUs but its not that far away (not like bulldozer days).
    Reply
  • missingxtension
    CRITICALThinker said:
    I hope that if tomshardware does another article on this they put a bit more effort into their reporting. As someone who participated in the auction with Brutus (he was our man on the ground and will be doing logistics, would never have heard about the auction if it wasn't for him).

    How the hell could a tech reporter ignore the clock speed entirely when comparing performance... It's appalling really. Further information on this article is that the multiplier on the boards is fully unlocked, however we aren't quite sure how it's handled since it's very unpolished. It has booted at 2.5ghz and 1.2v to my knowledge, but like all VIA architectures it unlikely will go much higher and I doubt many people are crazy enough to do much overclocking on such a rare cpu.
    Very disappointed..I was expecting some actual details, like what mother board is it running on, how well does linux run, or something more relevant. Luckily I read the comments and actually got some information
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    I had a Centaur way back when. The processor's ID comes back as "CentaurHauls".
    Reply
  • Soul_keeper
    via had quality designs imo. They were just too small, too late, and a node or two behind everytime.
    I had always hoped they'd release something competitive. The same with Transmeta, too bad all the x86 competitors are gone.
    I also liked the via Socket A chipsets, kt133 kt133a. They had good memory controllers at the time.
    Reply