Cyrix III was designed as a low-cost alternative to Intel's Celeron processor. Cyrix III uses the same 370-pin socket as Celeron. In many cases, retailers can pair Cyrix III chips with older motherboards that they can no longer use Celeron chips, Havey said. Via says it would prefer to let AMD and Intel fight it out when it comes to ever-increasing clock speeds. Analysts say low prices alone won't boost Via's fortunes, unless it can show performance comparable to competing chips.
Any challenger does.
The latest campaign comes in advance of Via's plans to launch new and improved versions of the Cyrix III that approach the 1GHz mark. Via announced a new 700MHz Cyrix III chip late last week. Via purchased Cyrix from National Semiconductor and Centaur from IDC in August 1999. Cyrix III chips have a 128KB Level 1 cache and offer front side bus speeds of 66MHz, 100MHz and 133MHz. Samuel2 adds a 64KB Level 2 cache for greater performance, but lowers cost and power consumption over the current chip, thanks to a newer 0.15-micron manufacturing process.