HR needs you to tell the difference between these two chips nothing how
about now what is a centaur CPU I mean
it certainly isn't the kind of thing you'd find on new eggs or how'd we get our hands on one I can't tell you that
but what I can tell you is that it is a prototype x86 CPU that fits into an
Intel socket on this motherboard that doesn't work with an Intel CPU it's not
made by Intel or AMD for that matter and
while it doesn't have much in common physically with a mythical Beast it very
much is one just like our beastly
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we're going to get to who Centaur is in a moment but first what is up with this
motherboard it's got an Intel socket LGA
2011 V3 to be exact but we were told by our anonymous source that you should not
put an Intel CPU in it so it's physically the same but electrically
completely incompatible kind of like when you see a USB port that's labeled
rs232 they've just reused the housing
and the pins in order to save time and cost but all the signal in is completely
different I have never seen that done with a CPU socket though and the
motherboard it soldered to is a trip there's normal stuff you got what
appears to be a quad Channel memory configuration just like we saw on the
Intel CPUs that used this socket standard PC power inputs PCI Express
expansion slots couple m.2 storage slots those were showing up on Intel around
this time as well but as we dig deeper
it is absolutely covered in jumpers and
dip switches and that is an indication that this is a development platform
board so with these which I've been instructed not to touch you can actually
change the characteristics of either the CPU itself or the behavior of the
motherboard depending on what you're trying to test this was a weird one for
me too it's actually got one of those gamery segmented audio sub pcbs with a
CD audio connector okay now hold on a
second we need to take a closer look at this moving along the bottom we've got a
USBC Port not a header an actual Port so
that probably connects either to some kind of Hardware interface or another PC
for Diagnostic and development purposes and then back to the front I've been
told that I should take the heat sink off of here guess we'll put you back
later and have a look at this guy zx200
what are you interesting USB SATA networking and PCI Express
switching that's about it it and what that means is that this CPU is a highly
integrated s so without the platform
controller Hub that you would find on an Intel motherboard of this generation so
it's more like a Threadripper in our search for identifying marks we found
some cool stuff there's a bunch of probe points on this board which are Super
useful for developers when they're trying to figure out what's going on with power delivery or on the various
buses and we found this little label
ch001 DC next to the Centaur Tech
technology logo and maybe more importantly this sticker the QR code
doesn't go anywhere but Kodiak assembly is a company that provides PCB assembly
and other fabrication services and this date has this board manufactured in
September of 2019 that is not that long
ago most PCS these days and really for
almost the last 25 years use CPUs from
AMD and Intel a duopoly that they maintain by refusing to license the x86
instruction set to any other part but there is another sentaur technology
was founded in 1995 as a subsidiary of
IDT by former IBM fellow Glenn Henry to
do what IBM didn't do and the concept
was simple a small team building a low complexity lowcost energy efficient
desktop CPU for the then new sub $1,000
PC market this became the win chip and
it was modestly successful mostly in Market markets outside of the US
offering adequate performance at half of the size of a contemporary Pentium class
CPU unfortunately Intel took notice and
did what Intel did best in the 9s and absolutely crushed them centaur was
ultimately acquired then alongside cyrix by via Technologies in
1999 their next CPU the cyx 3 found
little Commercial Success on the desktop but in embedded systems it was so
popular that many ITX was developed specifically to show off its successor
the C3 Now Intel who had already sued
via over chipset patents in the 90s sued via again in 2001 for x86 patent
infringement and Via counter sued for the infringement of centaur's patents
ultimately they both settled in 2003 with a 10-year cross- licensing
agreement that stipulated that via / Centaur could continue creating x86
designs as long as they were not in any way compatible with Intel chipsets a fun
bit of trivia here is via used to make motherboard chipsets and the settlement
gave them until 2017 to stop doing that for Intel chips so that explains how
Centaur got away with building an x86 CPU but it doesn't explain why they
built it and to find that out we've got to take a closer look at what it is
starting with what it's not it's not a CPU it's an S so code named Centaur
halls or cha that's why our motherboard has no chipset on it it's all on the
chip itself it's got up to eight cores clocked it up to 2.5 GHz though 2.0 is
stock on our chip and it supports AVX
512 kind of like AMD has done on their
most recent Zen 4 architecture in such a way that it doesn't require the chip to
be downclocked like intels did at the time the biggest piece though is an
onboard AI accelerator code named encor
it added essentially no cost but it could access the CPU's level three cache
and system memory extremely quickly it
was meant to be the killer app for this platform with an extremely high-speed
bidirectional 160 gab pers second connection to the CPU itself that's more
bandwidth than a PCIe Gen 6 by6 slot
unfortunately while their idea for a lowcost AI accelerated platform was
pretty well timed the actual execution
well not so much we'll get into that a little bit later first did I tell you
this thing works let's fire it
up even the fact they got as far as silicon power on means they were deep
into development of this platform like real work was done and that is
mindblowing the BIOS build date is
2021 guys that is 2 and 1/2 years ago
they were still developing for this thing and just 2 months before Intel
purchased centaur's engineering staff from via man I feel like a kid who just
got dropped off at the playground what do I go on first the monkey bars or the
marryg go round now because this is a debug board there's a lot of items that
go nowhere and do nothing but there's some really cool stuff in here oh did it
just turn off it sure did it did um
uh what I mean what all is there for us to play with here CPU configuration
there's our 2 GHz clock speed oh nonfused CPU ah fuses apparently there's
a whole bunch of fuses that we can blow in here and if you're not familiar fuses
can lock functionality like uh instruction sets or even uh CPU cache
and that's one of the ways that we get a lower-end chip from a higher end chip so
theoretically they could put a top speec chip in a board like this one blow up
the parts they don't need and end up with any chip from the lineup the
concluder now hold on a sec if I'm understanding this correctly it changes
the CPU ID to be whatever it is that I
tell it to be Intel probably wouldn't like this for AVX
512 that would have been really useful for this kind of application I wonder if
this thing's a PlayStation 3 emulation monster demo board is just onboard land
enable disable I guess they hadn't put it in the proper category yet this is
surprisingly robust and finished looking PCI Gen 2 only though this was toward
the very end of PCIe gen 2's life cycle
this is really important setting Dam timings because oh my God those default
timings I can see why you had to put it all in manually for now we're going to
leave all of this alone including the ever so tempting the concluder button
and let Windows see the real deal while we wait for it to boot by the way you
can shop the real deal with YouTube shopping and get 20% off of our backpack
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we're in Windows the first thing you'll probably notice is we're running Windows
10 that's cuz there's no firmware TPM and no module that we were able able to
easily find for the header that's on the board so Windows 10 then uh we could try
to bypass the lock for Windows 11 but I've been told realistically the
system's slow enough on 10 steam 100%
the CPU easily when downloading at I
mean let's do a quick speed test there it is 2 GHz at super super slow timings
we'll get these tweaked we'll get these tweaked before we do any oh my
God sorry I was about to say performance testing but I guess I mean lack of
performance testing 350
megabit that is not fast this is cool
though it knows that it's Centaur technology even has the right code name
it is often amazing to me how much
information something like a CPU Z is able to pull off of Hardware that in the
wild doesn't exist in the mainboard tab
we see the chipset is made by Jin that's
name that's going to come up later also PCI Express 3.0 now wait a second it
said PCIe Gen 2 in the BIOS but the bus spec say gen 3 here honestly I would
trust CPU Z over that janky BIOS and gen
3 makes way more sense for that time period because we were on the cusp of
Gen 4 by that point enough fooling around for now though Emily's going to
get this thing dialed in and we're going to do some performance testing and
sometime later we're going to have an exclusive over at lm. g/f flat plane of
Emily going through everything that was changed we've got there we go that's
more like it and I can drag a window around now yes without it lagging behind
me I guess the first thing I want to do is run C bench R20 look at this I'm on
the internet on a centaur loads the way you'd expect I mean it's x86
right there's some differences but but but mostly that is not
fast 3 hours later almost there
1660 to put that in context the ryzen 7
1700x which was not even the top performing ship at the time came out 7
years ago and is more than double that score I'm afraid to see what's going to
happen in gaming I'm afraid to see what a single core run would look like how
many points was that no no points I bet we can gain
though we'll just play older games lighter games play Dave the diver
oh my goodness and this isn't even because it has a mechanical hard drive
in it this is just how fast it
is I mean In fairness it does work our
next game is Doug hug which was created as a prank I guess to generate fake
outrage around the time of the launch of Duke Nukem Forever and uh they said they
would do it 13 years ago and actually followed through here it is in 2024 it's
time to generate some some positivity cuz games are just too negative
this there are sharks in the sky Let's help this granny across the street shall
we here we go mimo let's go let's go let's go let's go let's go come on pick up the pace
lady yeah okay she'll make it I can't
stop frown I think it's some kind of turn that frown upside down that's not
the same voice actor as Duke Nukem is it it is that is John St John oh now is the
perfect opportunity to find out if that USBC Port is in fact a functioning USBC
Port can I plug a controller into it yes
now that doesn't mean that it isn't for Diagnostics it very likely is but it
also just happens to be a USBC Port it's
a super cool game it's a Rog light hockey game you go on a campaign to
restore hockey to its former glory uh there's all kinds of cool upgrades like
you can throw your stick at opponent you can fart and push them away so they
can't body check you pretty fun and with the latest beta supports five player
local multiplayer so you can have every player on your team be human controlled
just don't lose a game or your campaign's over hey look at this in the
lightest possible games we can get 150
frames per second no problem
buddy here we go here we go here we go
let's go come on you know what it feels pretty laggy
though I'm not not going to lie it does not feel like 150 frames per second the
point is other than being slow there's nothing that really sets this thing
apart from any other computer that I've used it works try C bench 2024 no
avx2 I know where we're going with this I'm going to pretend to be a different
CPU now right that is where the concluder comes in as far as we can tell
some applications instead of checking the instruction set support are just
checking a list of I don't know CPU
models that are known to support the instruction set and if you don't happen
to have it they're just spitting out an error and cinebench 24 would be one of
them cuz according to CPU Z the CPU does
in fact support avx2 but I guess we're about to find out if we artificially
change the reporting ID to Skylake X
will it run I mean probably won't run
but it might walk oh that's hilarious oh Intel would would not be happy about
this it even shows an Intel logo it even
misreports does it even misreport the
socket that's super weird oh my God this
cor speed okay it has no idea what's
going on why does it say PCI E Gen 4 now
there's no way that's right hold on a second what is our GPU reporting oh this
is fascinating no it's gen 3 wait but it
report it reports a bus interface of Gen 4 is it Gen 4 not my
knowledge yes no no what and of course C
bench 2024 totally launches in an effort to get the end core neural processor
working we fired up Linux as well but we had even more problems in Linux than we
did in Windows it takes forever to boot the desktop is even laggier and our PCIe
devices seem to run at incorrect speeds also no public driver seems to exist for
the encor so we weren't able to test it and the fonics test Suite takes forever
just to download let alone to run with how customizable Linux is I think this
is one of if not the first time that we've had some weird esoteric piece of
Hardware that works less completely or less reliably on Linux than it does on
Windows but hey even Champions have bad
days all of which is interesting but doesn't answer our big questions how did
this come to be and why Why didn't it get over the Finish Line in order to
answer that we've got to do a little bit of a history lesson the final
commercially released design from centaur was the Via Nano X2 code name
Isaiah that came out back in 2011 and was a dual core chip meant for Pico ITX
systems and meant to compete with Intel atom now in the 2010s pretty much
everyone Intel included saw the writing on the wall for embedded x86 not to
mention that via's patent cross license deal with Intel with which included the
x86 license was only guaranteed until
2013 so that same year then via started
the xiaan joint venture with the Shanghai municipal government where s
so's would be developed for the Chinese market where uh pesky things like IP
licensing deals don't matter quite as much but in spite of their obvious
attempts to safeguard their future by investing in China they weren't out of
the global market just yet in 2014
rumors circulated of a Poss Centaur x86
SL ARM hybrid project but nothing came
of it and then in 2019 they announced the cha the S so that we're looking at
today the idea was that it would be positioned against Intel's Zeon CPUs at
an estimated price of just $500 to $1,000 which sounds like a pretty
compelling story but the headwinds were many and they were Mighty in 2019 alone
Intel's lowcost Cascade Lake launched Intel's high-end ice Lake SB was due to
launch and AMD's epic RAM launched with Incredible core counts that absolutely
dwarfed what Centaur Halls was expected to deliver in the second half of 2020
not only that but gpus and AI accelerator cards had already taken over
the task of machine learning from the CPU and the performance was not even
close don't believe me ask Jensen hang's accountant NVIDIA's Tesla T4 which was a
downclocked RTX 2070 super was 2 $2,000
in 2019 which is a lot more than one of
these but absolutely Stomps all over the
end course performance even with an older four core Skylake CPU that cost
only $213 so generously if we assume that
Centaur Halls launched at $500 that Zeon
plus T4 combo is 4 and half times the price for four to five times the
performance which actually sounds pretty reasonable until you consider that going
the other route you'd get a platform from a company that's launched more than
one commercial chip in the past 8 years you could use Cuda so you have broader
compatibility and you can throw consumer gpus in these things for a lower price
too so yeah they had a good idea for
2017 but by 2019 the industry was just moving too fast for it to make any sense
and by 2021 much of centaur's engineering was sold over to Intel
leaving via with mainly just Cent intellectual property which kind of
makes you wonder if Intel had a hand in Centaur Halls cancellation Centaur Halls
was as far as we know the final s so designed in-house by Centaur and much of
its DNA is actually shared with the Xian chips like the one that we looked at
some time ago which makes it kind of a missing link between where xia Shin is
today and the Isaiah based via Nano and
unfortunately that's all it is a missing link to our sponsor I fix it that loud
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video why not check out the one where we looked at one of those xiaosen CPUs at
the time we were looking at it going how did these guys get an x86 license and
well they kind of didn't I guess