Cheap PCs from Wal-Mart

[Bob Drzyzgula]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 04:56:02PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:
> 
> > I had not read of the Via chips and had been planning to use the AMD Athlon
> > chips. Are the via chips ok? Will they run linux/mosix ok? Any specific
> > thoughts about them?
> 
> they're fairly slow, from what I've read, and still use the P5 pinout
> (which means you'll peak at around 500 MB/s).  the chip is optimized 
> for area/power/price first, not performance - VIA's been pushing it for
> use in embedded/appliance kinds of uses.

Actually, the lastest Via Cyrix/Centaur C3 chips use a Socket 370 interface,
and support SSE. One thing that made them particularly slow until
recently was that they ran the FPU at half the core speed; the 1GHz
unit now runs it at full speed.

Still, the C3 is probably a bad choice for a computationally intensive
application.

--Bob
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