Centaur Technology

Centaur Technology is an x86 CPU design company, now a wholly owned subsidiary of VIA Technologies, a member of the Formosa Plastics Group, Taiwan's largest industrial conglomerate.

Centaur Technologies Inc. was founded in April 1995 by Glenn Henry, Terry Parks, Darius Gaskins, and Al Sato. The funding came from Integrated Device Technology, Inc (IDT). The business goal was to develop compatible x86 processors that were much less expensive than Intel processors and consumed much less power.

There were two fundamental elements of the plan. First, a unique design, developed from scratch, of an x86 processor core optimized differently from Intel's cores. Second, a unique management approach designed to achieve high productivity.

While founded by IDT, three different Centaur designs were shipped under the marketing name of WinChip. In September 1999, Centaur was purchased from IDT by VIA Technologies, a Taiwanese company. Since then, five designs have shipped with marketing name of VIA C3, quite a number of designs as the VIA C7 processor, and their latest 64-bit CPU, the VIA Nano.

Centaur's chips are much smaller, cheaper to manufacture and consume less power . This makes them highly attractive in the embedded marketplace, and increasingly in the mobile sector as well.

Centaur design philosophy was always centered on "sufficient" performance for tasks that its target market demands. Some of the design trade offs made by the design team run contrary to accepted wisdom.

In a trend-setting move, processors were designed with hardware encryption acceleration starting with the VIA C7. Following its release many Intel and AMD processors incorporate this feature.

NOTE: Even the 180 nm Duron Morgan core (106 mm²) with a mere 64 K secondary cache, when shrunk down to a 130 nm process, would have still had a die size of 76 mm². The VIA x86 core is clearly the smaller and cheaper to produce. As can be seen in this table, almost four C7 cores could be manufactured in the same area as a single core P4 Prescott on 90 nm process.

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