VIA Cyrix III 533, 600MHz (3/4)
Posted by Wesley on| CPU: | Celeron & Cyrix III |
| M/B: | MSI MS-6309 (VIA 694x chipset) - VIA 4-in-1 v4.24a - |
| Cooling: | Standard Intel Heatsink/Fan |
| RAM: | 64MB x 2 Samsung PC-100 CAS3 SDRAM |
| Video: | MSI MS-8808 (NVIDIA Riva TNT2 m64) - NVIDIA Det. v6.26 - |
| OS: | Windows 98 - Version 4.10.1998, Korean - |
| Else: | DirectX 8 beta2 build 146 installed |
| Benchmark | Celeron | Cyrix III | Duron | ||
| 466MHz | 533MHz | 600MHz | 650MHz | ||
| d.net client | RC5 Long, opt.core (MKeys/s) | 1.312 | 0.650 | 0.731 | 2.230 |
| Sandra 2000 7.6.49 | Dhrystone (MIPS) | 1262 | 600 | 667 | 1855 |
| Whetstone (MFLOPS) | 627 | 174 | 199 | 876 | |
| Multimedia ALU (it/s) | 1438 (MMX) | 578 (MMX) | 650 (MMX) | 2150 (MMX) | |
| Multimedia FPU (it/s) | 670 (FPU) | 889 (3DNow!) | 1001 (3DNow!) | 2751 (3DNow!) | |
| Memory ALU (MB/s) | 122 | 112 | 115 | 423 | |
| Memory FPU (MB/s) | 135 | 166 | 164 | 531 | |
Duron benchmarks come from earlier article for reference. What do we have here? Cyrix III's performance is not only easily beaten by a Celeron of lower MHz, but it gets run over flat by other 'value' chip, AMD Duron. A Celeron 466 is posting up to twice the speed of a Cyrix III 600. This is certainly not good. If you look at the Whetstone(FPU) benchmark, Cyrix III's FPU is simply jaw-dropping(the other way around). It is somehow overcome with the implementing 3DNow!, as Multimedia FPU benchmark shows much better score. However, this means that unless an FPU-intensive program such as a game supports 3DNow! well, expect incredible slowdowns.
These results were not very far from the expectations, but as you can see, VIA's decisions on choosing MHz over performance is having some serious whiplash. It's just sad that many customers may fall victim to the 'MHz sells' scheme. The impact is vastly more serious when comparing Cyrix III with AMD's Duron. Once upon a time (about 2 years ago) AMD and Cyrix's offerings had relatively similar performance in general. Now, Duron outperforms Cyrix by about three times on average! Despite the fact that both chips are competing in the same market segment, comparing Durons to Cyrix III looks almost wrong.
What if you take the actual selling price to account? Cyrix III is expected to be selling at around $60 for 600MHz version. Since Celeron sells for about $90~100 for the same MHz, price-performance ratio is similar or slightly bad for Cyrix III. This fact is rather fortunate for Cyrix III, because in the area where raw CPU performance doesn't matter much, such as in general business environment, this looks attractive - you get the performance that you only paid for. The local distributor is not dumb, and this is exactly where they'll focus on the sales of the chip.