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AMD Businesses Hardware

AMD Buys Pre-VIA Cyrix Media-GX Division 157

Posted by timothy from the the-chips-that-started-out-down dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A long time ago, in what feels like a different universe, Cyrix created the first sub-$1000 PC based on a 2 chip solution called the Media-GX. Soon after National Semiconductor bought Cyrix, keeping the Media-GX team and selling the 686MX team to VIA. In the meantime, the Media-GX team have created the a series of single chip PCs, and a totally new CPU, the GX2. Now National Semiconductor is selling the division to AMD, which should give it a higher profile and better fab technology again." Reader jlouderb reminds us of National Semiconductor's Device Girls promotion, "a lame take-off on the Spice Girls," and points to coverage at eWeek of the purchase.
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AMD Buys Pre-VIA Cyrix Media-GX Division More

AMD Buys Pre-VIA Cyrix Media-GX Division

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  • Old school (Score:5, Informative)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) * on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:27PM (#6627792) Journal
    Speaking of old CPUs: Memory lane of old CPUs [redhill.net.au]

    It even has a picture of the Media-GX in there.

  • Device Girls (Score:2, Insightful)

    by saskwach ( 589702 )
    Ugh, can't anyone appeal to common sense instead of sex drive? Make way for bad hardware related puns.

    • Re:Device Girls (Score:4, Funny)

      by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:31PM (#6627833)
      Hey, I wanna know where they are now. Where's the E! True Hollywood Story on the Device Girls? Are they in pr0n, yet? :)

      USB Spice
      FireWire Spice
      Gigabit Spice
      mini-ITX Spice

      Mmmmm.

    • Ugh, can't anyone appeal to common sense instead of sex drive?

      What, are you new to the natural world? Your puritanical disapproval of sex is both unnatural and self-destructive. All things relate to sex. I for one appreciate the advertisers constant reminder that, yes, virginia, there is only one biological imperitive: to sire as many bastards as possible. Sex in advertising makes us aware of a products connection with sex, gives meaning to our consumerism impulses, and gives us hope in an incr

      • So...You don't mind being told that if you buy something from National Semiconductor you'll get laid? I would rather have a product be sold to me on its merits than on the merits of some models who get paid to pretend to want to have sex with me. It's just kind of insulting.

        This is not a puritanical disapproval of sex. I'm perfectly fine with sex, just not in advertising where the product is not sex related. Try to sell me a box of condoms with promises of a better sex life? Sure, go for it. Try to s

        • Re:Device Girls (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by scotch ( 102596 )
          Appeal to higher brain functions, please

          The purpose of the higher brain functions is getting laid more often. Grandparent post was written tongue in cheek. Is your tampon interfering with your sense of humor?

  • lame? hardly... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:29PM (#6627815)
    They certainly looked better than the Spice Girls. I bet they sounded better, too, though who cares about that. :)

  • Reminds me of something else... (Score:5, Funny)

    by goldspider ( 445116 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:30PM (#6627821) Homepage
    "Reader jlouderb reminds us of National Semiconductor's Device Girls promotion, 'a lame take-off on the Spice Girls,'"

    Am I the only one who thought of "Device Girls" as those unenlightened females who prefer various mechanical devices over us virile geeks?

  • Possible purpose (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:33PM (#6627841) Homepage Journal
    Perhaps what AMD wants is not their CPU, but the stuff that they've integrated in with it to create a single-chip PC. In a year or so, we might see a single-chip system based on one of the AMD processors.

    • Re:Possible purpose (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "single-chip PC".

      No.

      If you would RTFA, you would see that they are getting into the set-top box market. But why RTFA when you have to post early to get karma right!
      • Actually, I don't think the "PC on a chip" idea conflicts with the making of thin clients and set-top boxes. It would lower assembly costs and allow them to get acceptable performance in a very small package.
    • A bit offtopic, but what I wanna know is, whatever happened to those 2 cpu's on one chip people were talking about a while back?
      • Go ask IBM (Power4) or HP (PARISC) and be prepared to pay for it.

        Theoretically IA-64 will be getting this (and I will believe it when I see one. (and given how Intel keeps it's IA-64 related schedules I'll say 2032 perhaps)

        Damn Compaq for not letting us have alphas that way (The first mention of it being serious was alphas-just before compaq bought them and decided to milk the alpha users)

        • Damn Compaq for not letting us have alphas that way (The first mention of it being serious was alphas-just before compaq bought them and decided to milk the alpha users)

          "Milk"? Is that what you kids are calling it these days? Is "Milk" when you drop trou and make some grunting noises and exudate malodorous brown substance upon the object of that transitive verb? Don't get me wrong. I don't completely hate Compaq. It's just that I like everything Canadian (including their ever-threatened sense of ind

    • Re:Possible purpose (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RevRigel ( 90335 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:50PM (#6627958)
      You can already get single chip systems based on their IA chips if you're doing embedded development: Kontron's X-Board [get-x-board.com], which just came out. We're using a Kontron PC/104 board with a standalone Geode on it right now and it's the most rock solid board I've ever used. The X-board is going to make our next revision incredibly small, low power, and inexpensive.

      Although, I have to wonder what this will do the ZFMicrosystems lawsuit against National. Basically, ZFMicro was started by the original founder of Ampro, which originated the popular PC/104 standard, and integrated a 586 processor core with a bunch of peripherals into the ZFx86, a neat little cheap (I have an MZ104 from Tri-m Systems that uses it. Squeezes a slackware distro into a 6.8MB file on a flash chip). Unfortunately, ZFMicro used National as their foundry and for some of their last-line development. So National got access to schematics and layout info for the chip, instead of just masks. National then proceeded to steal it and integrate the Geode proc they bought from Cyrix with some on-chip peripherals in the same way, and then put ZFMicro out of business by refusing to ship any more ZFx86s.

      • Re:Possible purpose (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Unfortunately, ZFMicro used National as their foundry and for some of their last-line development. So National got access to schematics and layout info for the chip, instead of just masks. National then proceeded to steal it and integrate the Geode proc they bought from Cyrix with some on-chip peripherals in the same way, and then put ZFMicro out of business by refusing to ship any more ZFx86s.

        Remember this next time somebody wants to outsource stuff to India/Phillipeans/etc.

    • Re:Possible purpose (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:54PM (#6627996) Journal
      Perhaps what AMD wants is not their CPU, but the stuff that they've integrated in with it to create a single-chip PC.

      Well... that is the only logical conclusion. ARM has taken the portable world because X86 compatibility isn't important there. It will be some time before AMD can afford to put an entire Athlon system on a chip but it will eventually happen. Now they just need to buy a graphics chip designer like AMD or nVidia.

      Can you imagine the bandwidth between CPU and video? A 2048-bit bus between video and CPU wouldn't be a problem if you put it all on the same chip, not to mention the reduction in latentcy with the memory interface.

      Maybe the nVidia/AMD relationship ala NForce is a sign of what is to come?

      • Re:Possible purpose (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        the die size would be huge and the yield would be almost 0. the technology to fab that just doesn't exist yet

      • Not just video! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) * on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @04:43PM (#6628383)
        But there's more! it's not just video on the CPU, it's the north AND south bridges! The CPU, GPU, memory controller, PCI controller, and who-knows-what-else are on this bad-boy! I've been wanting this sort of thing for a long time!

        I understand that the price will be longer development cycles and raw performance, but there are a LOT of uses for machines based on this type of thinking. Imagine how inexpensive PCs based on this type of thing could get, and how little power they would require! If managers get their heads around the idea of centralized computing again (as they should in the office) we're going to see huge demand for inexpensive fast-enough graphical terminals.
        • Via already does this with their EIPA chips, built in video and everything, IIRC.

          I wouldn't be suprised if NVida comes out with a high performance system though, with their expansion into chipsets.
          • No they don't. I have an EPIA-platform machine in front of me right now, the CPU, north and south bridges, and various I/O chips are all seperate. The EPIA is just a regular PC motherboard crammed onto a small form-factor with a VIA CPU strapped onto it, no 'integration' whatsoever.

        • I understand that the price will be longer development cycles and raw performance, but there are a LOT of uses for machines based on this type of thinking. Imagine how inexpensive PCs based on this type of thing could get, and how little power they would require!

          Yeah. But that makes me wonder if that super duper closure of architecture wouldn't wind up inspiring someone to corner the market and play jealous pranks like SCO and Microsoft do in the system software space? Throughout the past several year

          • Well there would certainly be something of a price to pay for more integrated machines, but considering that Linux is part of the march towards lower cost and more customized computing, I think we would be included rather than shut out of the emerging market. Who wants to make $100 computers if they only run MS or proprietary (expensive to develop and not interoperable) operating systems?

            I also think that here's a balance to seek, right now PCs are total beasts, there's nothing elegant about a modern mothe
      • Now they just need to buy a graphics chip designer like AMD or nVidia.

        AMD just needs to buy AMD, eh? I'll assume you mean ATI.

      • Re:Possible purpose (Score:5, Interesting)

        by William Tanksley ( 1752 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @06:40PM (#6629362)
        If you remember the interview with Chuck Moore (of Forth fame) a while back, he was promoting a chip kinda like this. 25 CPUs all on one chip (5x5), with a grid of 18-bit busses, 5 each way, connecting them all to each other horizontally and vertically. He hadn't built any, but based on his previous chips at much larger scales, he was estimating about 2400MHz maximum bus input latency; with 10 independant busses, that means an upper bound of 10*2400M*18=432,000Mbps internal.

        Of course, that's all noise -- none of the chips would have time to do real work :-), nor to listen for any of that "information". But the sheer magnitude of the number is a bit staggering. But anyhow, yes, on-chip busses are pretty fun.

        Oh, latest rumor: he took the 25x page down because he'd found a buyer. Very little other info available.

        -Billy
      • "Can you imagine the bandwidth between CPU and video?"

        It actually doesn't matter much. The bandwidth of the AGP bus is used mostly for loading textures into the GPU; it's the memory bandwidth on the card that makes it fast. Now, a GPU/Memory integrated combo would be very interesting. Unfortunately, it would also be far more expensive than discrete memory.
    • Huh. I wonder how close this is to that AMD alchemy au1100 chip.
      • Not close at all, but interestingly they go after the same applications. The Au1x00 chips are MIPS cored, so they're not even close architecturally.

        I really have no good idea why AMD bought these jokers. Maybe AMD was infringing on NS's IP, and the results was that AMD just buys that part of NS?

        Damn, it's hot under this tinfoil hat.

  • Arrgh (Score:3, Funny)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:34PM (#6627850) Homepage Journal

    Please, do not revive the old jokes about mount and devices.

    We've all read the sigs about the subject.

    • Please, do not revive the old jokes about mount and devices.

      But that parrot hurts so bad, and Natalie Portman's fresh grits were ready to eat by breakfast time, and a Beowolf cluster really really would be a fscking economical way to get the most out of whatever device she wants to mount... and, and, and

  • What does this mean for National Semiconductor's analog processing business?

  • IBM going to buy AMD? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by useosx ( 693652 )
    This story reminded me of an article from the Register [theregister.co.uk] about how some analysts think IBM will eventually buy AMD. Didn't IBM used to sell Cyrix chips or something?
  • a chipset company, and/or a motherboard company, and someone to clarify the cpu naming mombo-jumbo! Confusion is not the way to compete!

    (offtopic, I know, just venting)
    • ... Intel. That would certainly solve many of their problems.
    • AMD is capable of making their own motherboards and chipsets, and usualy does when they come out with new CPUs. But they don't ship them for very long, figuring that it's better to have the taiwanese board and chipset makers on their side, as allies.
    • AMD seems to be finally starting to take chipset design somewhat seriously, plus they finally got a decent third party chipset manufacturer a couple years ago when nVidia signed on. I don't think that they need to make motherboards themselves, but I do believe that they should contract one of the Taiwanese companies to make AMD-branded motherboards.

      As for AMD's naming scheme though, I rather like how they are doing things with the Opteron. It's VERY simple but also much more descriptive than using MHz/GH

  • Device Girls! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Sean80 ( 567340 )
    I'd go online with them any day! Reeeeoow!

  • In a galexy far, far away (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 7x7 ( 665946 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:40PM (#6627892)
    I bought a montherboard with a 166+ 686 CPU from Cyrix. It worked better and lasted longer than the Gateway pentium 166 boxes we had at work. Alas, my rommate spilled a pot of coffee on the bugger and it died with a POP, a SNAP and a SIZZLE. From what I learned, there were two versions of that chip. Version 1 overheated a lot, but if you kept it cool it was fine. Verion 2 didn't overheat, but flaked and flaked and flaked until you wanted to beat it with a bat. My sis wanted a box and I got her a $199 PC with a Cyrix MII 333 chip a few years later. Mistake. 'nuf said. End of my Cyrix experience.
    • Thats funny, we still have gateway 166 boxes here, and they're all still working just fine.
      • I just went through that site and looked up the two chips I had and they verified it all.

        The first Cyrix 166+ worked fine if you kept it cool.

        The first MII 333 was a flake.

        Those Pentium 166 boxes ran fine and solid, no argument there, but the Cyrix was a bit snappier. At least until the coffee...
    • I had one of those Cyrix 166 CPU's. They actually ran at 133 MHz....

      It was a very inexpensive chip, which was great as I was an undergrad, and it gave reasonably good performance for the time.

      It was also the first CPU I'd ever owned that needed a cooling fan. Not believing a CPU really needed its own fan, I opened up the case, booted the system, and tried stalling the CPU fan with my thumb while the OS was running. At least in my case, the computer could run for only a matter of seconds before hard sta
      • They were sensitive to heat. I bought two as an undergrad and used them for simple FORTRAN CFD. They ran much better under Red Hat 6 than they did under Windblows, but excesive heat and humidity could bring them down.

        I still have one configured as a simple dialout box. It works well and shares dialup service with an ethernet card.

        The other, I may have fried. The new XFree86-4 stuff pumped it's video to 90 Hz! This is far in excess of the orignial specs. I put in antoher cooling fan for the second ch

    • If by "version 2," you mean the 6x86L/PR166, that was my first Pentium-oid (i.e., not 486) CPU! Initially, I was quite pleased by it. Of course, as I started dabbling with 3d graphics (ok, ok, Quake), I quickly found the CPU's major shortcoming: really poor FPU performance. Anyway, I wanted to say that I had no trouble with its stability. No "flaking," no urges to beat it with a bat. Well, no stability-related urges to beat it with a bat... Good times, good times.
      • I never actually owned the 2nd gen 166 (6x86L), but had a few friends who didn't like it. I remember something about a recall on the first one, and they got the L in return. Yeah, they weren't much good for 3d stuff, but they were great for most other stuff.
    • Version 2 you must mean the 6x86L? The 6x86L was a dual voltage chip like the Pentium MMX, and finding motherboards was a bit tough. They were solid, though I did see some OEMs put the thing on 3.5V that the 6x86 was rated for, that probably caused some problems.

      I had a PR200+ version of it. It ran nice and cool. It wouldn't overclock (I think it was more the motherboard's fault, because the only way to overclock the sucker would be to run the bus speed at 75Mhz instead of 66Mhz, and I had cheap ram).
      • I had a PR200+ too. When MP3's became important to me for background music, I ended up 'upgrading' to a 2nd hand Pentium 166 MMX CPU. It was moderately slower for office and web, but at least playing an MP3 only cost 10% CPU. So it netted out to be a better system.

        Unfortunately, I've got unpleasant memories of that PC, but that was mostly the motherboards fault - a PC Chips special. =) Last time I ever let the store pick the parts!
    • Though I remember that back in the day Cyrix was the... uh... crap parts for lack of better words. We used to sit around making fun things running cyrix chips/mobos. We used to SERIOUSLY beat on them and their parts. I had an old BBS running on a pc with the cyrix 166, ran okay, but had heat problems, was kinda unstable, not very good for a 5 node BBS. But it was a bargain box, and it's hard to tell what is being crappy, the cyrix chip, or the crappy mobo.

      IMHO you get what you pay for. You buy a cheap
    • (Sniffle.) Going down memory lane, hmm? Awwww. I lost my C++ cherry at 10 MHz on a Cyrix-equipped AT clone. It was in a butt-ugly greenish beige box from Northgate Computer. The turnkey machine was the precursor to the M1A1 Abrams tank, man. You could put an office staff on top of one of them things. The "tin" must have been like 14 guage. Anyway, the chip had no math coprocessor. It looked so cute sitting in the QFP square (68 pins???? maybe the next size bigger), and you could actually look at it

  • Better Device Girls image (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For what it's worth, Google is your friend [impress.co.jp]


  • AMD Using Geode to Lower Opteron/Athlon64 Power (Score:5, Insightful)

    by reporter ( 666905 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:45PM (#6627922) Homepage
    AMD is buying the 80x86 division of National Semiconductor (NSM) in order to obtain the embedded 80x86 technology and employee talent for lowering the power consumption of Opteron and Athlon64. The AMD 80x86 processors have generally run hotter than Intel 80x86 processors. Since AMD is in a brutal competition with Intel for marketshare, AMD must quickly improve its competitive position.

    AMD will not use the 80x86 division of NSM to create a 80x86 embedded processor. 80x86 chips fare poorly in the embedded market, which is dominated by ARM.

    • Re:AMD Using Geode to Lower Opteron/Athlon64 Power (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      wow that is utter bullcrap.

      ARM processors are very tiny nitche of the embedded market. Most embedded systems use 68HC Motorola processors and if they need more power X86 Based because of the flexibility of RTDOS and RTLinux.

      Go ahead, fine me a PC-104 ARM based board. gee why does most of the embedded system tha mean a damn like industrial control/ flight systems and automation NOT use ARM??

      because embedded = a whole helluva lot more than the crappy PDA toy market.

    • The AMD 80x86 processors have generally run hotter than Intel 80x86 processors.

      That's just not true anymore... As of about the P4 days, Intel has been using just as much power, and putting off as much heat as equivalent AMD processors.

      In fact, comparing an Intel P4 2GHz to my AMD XP 2000+ was interesting... It looks like the AMD chip gives off less heat, and also has a maximum operating temperature that is 20C degrees greater than the P4. That doesn't bode well for Intel.

      http://users.erols.com/chare [erols.com]

    • AMD chips have not generally run any hotter than their Intel counterparts. Occasionally one of the other might consume more power, but they tend to switch order. Right now Intel is quite firmly in the "hot seat" so to speak. Top-end P4's are consuming over 80W of power, while the top AthlonXP chips are only using about 65W of power and the Opteron uses less (though it's exact power consumption is currently undocumented). Back when the Athlon was competing with the PIII, the Athlon consumed more power.

  • This headline has so many acronyms... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Savatte ( 111615 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:51PM (#6627972) Homepage Journal
    that with a few changes, it would be as if somebody forgot to turn caps lock off.
  • Recently National let go of almost all their wire-less design groups [news.com.com story [com.com]].

    In that article National mentions the sub-$1000 PC business as one of their main areas of further interest. With this sale of the Geode, etc... I wonder how many more could be laid off and where National is looking for the future?

  • If ya wanna be my lover (Score:3, Funny)

    by aardwolf204 ( 630780 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:53PM (#6627988)
    ya gotta be compatible

  • Stating the obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hndrcks ( 39873 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @03:55PM (#6628010) Homepage
    Does AMD's purchase of low-power technology have anything to do with this? [slashdot.org]

  • What was National Semiconductor trying to tell us? That the Device Girls had some "powerful hardware?" No thanks, I think I'll pass. It would have made me feel bad about my own puny hardware.

  • Competition for VIA EPIA? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <stonentNO@SPAMstonent.pointclark.net> on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @04:32PM (#6628268) Journal
    This looks like it could directly compete with the EPIA Mini-ITX. I don't know what the fastest media gx core is, but it would be cool if AMD released a Mini-ITX board based around it. Especially if it could be done cheaper than the VIA board.

  • Good tech (Score:4, Funny)

    by afidel ( 530433 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2003 @04:33PM (#6628284)
    I remember Alan Cox stating that he was using a Media-GX based system to write and test the soundblaster layer for linux because the media-GX was a better fit to the SB standard then any of Creatives then current chips. He reasoned that if he could get closer to the origional standard then most clones would work, and aparantly he was right =)
  • the first machine i bought with my own money was a 486dx2/66 with a cyrix chip.....ah the memories....
    the last i saw it it was still working as a proxy server at my last job.
  • Where is Ginger Device?

    There are imitations of Baby, Scarry, Sporty, and Posh. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. I want Ginger Device!!!!!!!

    I sure would like those ladies to give me a little personal demonstration on I/O, packets, mounting, and of course FSCK!!!!!

    LK
  • I suspect many here are reading far too much into this news. Nat. Semi. was trying to sell this unit to shed costs, i.e. it probably wasn't (very) profitable. Thus, the asking price probably wasn't for very much cash. Who knows, they might even have gotten stock instead. Details weren't disclosed today, so there's no way to prove this either way, yet.

    In contrast, with Geode under AMD's control, there's a reasonable amount of overlap with AMD's Alchemy unit. They will be able to shed a lot of overhea

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