We just finished shooting this video yesterday, but there's a lot more that we can talk about
that didn't make it into the cut. In fact Linus cut like a whole bunch of it, even after I cut
a whole bunch of it. So what we're looking at here is the system itself. We took the tower heat sink
off so we could see the CPU. One of the problems with prototype hardware like this is that it's
not really built to be robust. In this case it basically died right after we shot.
Wait, really? Yeah, like I went to like take it over and like we put it back together because
Linus had taken the part to hold it up and all that kind of stuff, but plugged it in and like
the RAM did up. I'm like, huh, that's weird. And there was this high-pitched buzzing. I'm like,
huh, that's weird. I didn't hear that before. What's going on? Spent the afternoon yesterday after the
shoot trying to troubleshoot what's going on with this thing. And the TLDR is that either the motherboard
or the CPU is dead. As it turns out, this little chip right here was doing like 100 degrees celsius
and this little coil next to it, that was screaming. So unfortunately this is going
to have to go back to its owner in a non-working state. Now that being said, they actually kind
of expected this. Apparently this stuff actually just dies all the time. Like I said, it wasn't made
to be robust. It was meant to be a quick and dirty solution for testing. It was never meant to be like
a production sample. So they didn't beef up the PCB. They didn't use over spec components. They
literally just wanted to get it running and see what they could do with it. And the fact that
they got this far at all is actually really impressive because this is a whole platform.
I had platforms previously, but the last one they made was like in 2011 or even earlier like 2008
for the Isaiah cores. What we're looking at here is like a brand new thing based on a socket that
they shouldn't be using. And they built it up from, well, just the stuff that they had on hand,
including their IP, their development efforts over the years. Like we said in the end of the video,
they're gone now. Centaur, for the most part, like I think the name still exists and their
intellectual property still exists under VA's control. But their entire R&D division, their
developers, their engineers, that was all purchased by Intel back in 2021. Unfortunately, this is
going to be the last of these that we see. And that being said, all of the intellectual property
has been mostly transferred to Jiaoshin at this point, who, you know, if Intel decides to revoke
the x86 license, probably won't care. So, yeah. Do you think there'll be another like
CPU maker, basically? Like that's not Intel or AMD? Oh, well, Qualcomm is starting to pick up quite
a bit. Oh, really? And Apple Silicon is also like, you know, undeniably successful. So like, it's not
like x86 is the only game in town, nor will it be forever. As far as x86 goes, Intel, AMD, and I
guess Jiaoshin, and is there anybody else right now? I don't think there is. Because I think VA
actually had like most of the stragglers. Centaur and they also had Cyrix. They purchased them both
at the same time and in 1999, I think, and they discarded the work that Cyrix was working on. But
they used Cyrix as brand because they were more recognizable for the Cyrix 3, which was a Centaur
design. Yeah. Poor Cyrix and poor Centaur. Intel like kind of really messed with them. They messed
with a lot back then. Like, what you have to realize is that back in the 90s, it was still
relatively common for like IBM and ST Micro and a whole bunch of other companies to like just
straight up make Pentium chips. We're not, some Pentiums actually, yes. IBM actually made some
Pentiums, I think. I distinctly remember seeing some Pentiums in like a drawer and like one was
Intel and one was IBM and I'm like, okay. I know for a fact that 486s were like that and they
continued to make 486s for a long time. In fact, you can still buy 486 computers that are embedded
with like brand new 486 processors on modern technology like probably like 14 nanometer or
something like that at this point. So like, yeah, that's kind of how it used to be. But Intel started
cracking down on it and around the Pentium. AMD brought out their K6 and in this case,
IDT, Integrated Device Technologies, spun off Centaur or they created Centaur as a subsidiary
with the specific goal of creating a low-cost CPU. Because at the time, from what I understand,
I think the founder of Centaur, Glenn Henry, was a IBM Fellow. Previously to this was the
Senior Vice President of Products at Dell and he noticed that you can't buy a CPU at a cost
that would allow computers to be sold below $1,000. And he's like, okay, well this market
segment basically is where the computing industry is going to like heat up. So if we can get in there,
we'll actually have a really good position. So they got to work. They built the wind chip,
which I think they called the C6 and then the wind chip too. Neither were particularly
successful in the West, but in the overseas market, they were more successful because they were low
cost, very low power and like half the size of a Pentium in terms of the core dye. Their floating
point unit wasn't great, but in terms of integer, which is what most desktop apps at the time were
doing, it was perfectly fine. While that killed Cyrix for the enthusiast market, the whole floating
point is the future because 3D and all that kind of stuff, it didn't really hurt IDT's wind chip or
Centaur's wind chip in the same way because it was marketed as like a lower end, lower cost
thing. So it had adequate performance, but it was good for power consumption and it was good for
the wallet. So it actually did do a pretty good job, I think, early on. Ultimately, they were
sold on to Via in 1999. Did they do anything else at IDT? I don't remember. I know that part of the
reason why they went with the like super efficient design was because they had actually previously
worked with MIPS, which is like a, they used to make processors that were kind of like risk,
so reduced instruction set. That's kind of the philosophy they went at with x86. You know,
they went at it from the idea that they were half-man, so like cost-effective and power efficient
and half-beast x86. x86 is like a big monolithic beast even today, although there's like some
risky stuff in it. It's just weird. CPUs are weird. I can tell. I don't know. As far as the
motherboard goes, I have no idea what the cost would be. Probably going to be similar to other
motherboards on the market, especially considering the CPU is considered to be like a value budget
option. You know, they said that you needed like 24 of Intel's Xeon Platinum cores in order to
match the performance of their AI accelerator, which unfortunately, to this day, nobody really
knows how it works. Like there's there's specifications and like details about like the
inner workings, but like I think the only publicly available information about its
performance is from ML Perf from like 2019 or something like that. It wasn't great.
The NVIDIA T4, I mean like we said in the video, it was not even a contest. It was
way more expensive at $2,000 just for the card, but you could slot that into a machine that costs
a lot less and then get roughly equivalent performance per dollar between this and that,
but you could also add another one of those or even like a consumer GPU to get more AI oomph,
right? Like more machine learning. Whereas this, I mean, you could, you could add them,
but like by the time you're done, like it only has 44 PCI Express lanes. You're not going to add
that many. I don't know. It's it's a, what was what the platform even looked like? It wouldn't
use this socket purely, right? Like so I don't actually know what their plan was once like stuff
like the T4 started to like come down in price once Intel's processors started coming out with
more and more deep learning acceleration. I think that's probably what mostly put them off.
That and Epic. What was Epic Rome? Did Epic Rome have 64 cores? I think it was 64 and they have eight.
And is it cheaper? Epic? No, no, not at all, but Epic has way more PCI Express lanes. So you can
just slot in way more stuff. So like it's a more scalable. Whereas I don't see this scaling. That's
kind of the big problem and I think that's why nobody really bought it. Presumably if they had
customers lined up, then somebody would have ended up with like a one off or something.
But no, that's unfortunately the way that went. And now, of course, NVIDIA is swimming in cash
because AI accelerators, deep learning, all that kind of stuff is just like the current hotness.
Was it super micro stock is just going stonks right now because they sell the servers that
this stuff goes in. So like, I'm kind of waiting for all that to die down a little bit before making
any final calls on whether or not that's reasonable. But yeah, I don't think Santor would have been in
the running for that. Do you think it's important that there's more like chips or do you think like
AMD and Intel are like, yeah, we got this figured out and we don't need more CPUs in the market.
The fact that Ryzen came along and forced them to do something different made it so that the
market right now is so competitive like Intel had no competition in the data center,
like maybe a little bit of power PC for a little while in the like 2010s. But like now ARM was
starting to become a bit of an issue for them. But like, how much software is developed for ARM on
the server market, right? So like, you'd have to spin that up. And obviously it has been at this
point. But, you know, at the time, they didn't really have to worry that much about it. Whereas
now AMD with Epic, like they're taking a significant chunk out of Intel's market share in the like
the data center, as well as the desktop, like Intel is losing a lot of ground. That being said,
they're still strong. It's just kind of unthinkable. Like as of 2015, as early as 2015 or late, sorry,
people were calling that AMD was going to go under. Basically, the only thing keeping them alive was
the console contracts that they had supplying Microsoft and Sony. At least that's my perception.
Like basically, nobody was buying their CPUs or even their GPUs at that point, I don't think.
They just weren't competitive, right? Especially the FX series. Like, oh, don't get me started on the
FX series. You know, get started. Just because you have eight integer units and four floating
point units doesn't mean you have eight cores. Like most stuff that we're doing today requires
floating point. I thought we learned this lesson in the 90s with Cyrix, but apparently not. AMD
relearned the lesson and they suffered for it, I think rightly. But we also suffered as consumers.
Intel quad core with slightly more performance, slightly more performance, a little bit more clocks.
Nothing new. Whereas now, like my Ryzen 3000, 3900X that I use at home, it's like real old now.
And that's not something that would have happened over the course of like three years or four years.
Like back in the 20, like the 2010s, like CPUs had stagnated completely. There was no development
whatsoever. It was just like, yep, a little bit more, 10%, 15% in these workloads asterisk.
Competition is good and more chips on the market means more innovation. And that's why I'm kind
of excited to see like ARM takeoff in Windows, because it's taken off on macOS pretty well.
Powers, you know, Android and iOS. And we had x86 on Android for a short period of time, but that
didn't really do much. Actually, if anything, more chips in the smartphone market would actually
be a good thing. You know, just because they're all ARM doesn't mean that they're all the same,
right? Like Apple Silicon is very different from, you know, Snapdragon 8cx2 or whatever. You know,
more players in that game would be great. Like, say NVIDIA made a new SoC, or AMD got in the game,
or even Intel, right? Like, that could shake up the mobile industry and make phones exciting
again, right? Like, hey, we can do all sorts of like really cool stuff on our phones now. Whereas
now it's like, okay, the camera's better. They say it's faster, but like, is it really? Like,
it's not actually appreciably faster. Like, it's kind of like that Intel stagnation again.
Yeah. And I don't know how we got onto this topic from the center.
But yeah, we're just talking about this and then we're just talking about
it. It's okay. It's okay. Casual talks. Yeah. Like, I don't know. It's just, it's one of those
things where I think that more competition in the market is always going to be a good thing.
And whenever there's consolidation, so like Centaur no longer exists. I mean,
they were mostly only doing things for the embedded market anyway. But like,
Intel buying them just basically means that Intel has more of a monopoly now.
Right. Whereas, I guess it's not, it's technically a duopoly. We got Intel and we got AMD.
There is also ARM. ARM is getting, and RISC-5 actually. RISC-5 is getting bigger in the embedded
space, which is good because that's another new architecture that's out and it's open actually.
So like, people can use it with, I'm not sure if it's royalty free, but like, you can contribute
to the standard and you can adjust it the way you want to. In kind of a similar way to ARM,
but like, I think it's more, more liberal. I'd have to look it up. I don't remember off the
top of my head. Is there more things we won't talk about but this chip? Yeah, actually, there is
one more thing. You might be wondering why we went with Trident Z Royal RAM. The reason for this
is not because we thought we'd bling it out. Although it does kind of match the laser etching.
The reason we used this is because this is actually surprisingly our only kit of four
Samsung B-Die. Oh, really? BIMS. And the reason we needed that is because the IMC, the memory
controller on this thing, it was definitely an afterthought. Like, definitely, definitely. Like,
it only goes up to 3,200 megatransfer per second for one. So like, this RAM is rated for, what is
it rated for? Okay, it's 3,200. Fine. But you have to input the manual, like the timing is
manually. There's no XMP, no nothing like that. So you just go in, you go manual, and then you
have to like set every individual timing. Thankfully, the person who lent us this board
actually already had timing styled in that were stable and it worked great. Maybe that was why
the board blew up. I don't know. But yeah, like you can't even punch in directly some of the values.
You punch in a value and it's like, oh, it's too high. And it's like, oh, okay, well, I'll punch in
as close as I can get and then I'll put in like an offset because there's another offset function
further down. And it's like, why didn't they just, like, this is super weird development hardware
stuff. Like, why not just make it and the offset automatically based on what you type in?
Just the last one. Well, I mean, that is fine. Yeah, the the BIOS is actually really weird too.
There's all kinds of dead ends and like stuff placed in locations you wouldn't expect. And
it was clear that it wasn't really meant for prime time yet. That being said,
running this at 2.5 gigahertz, which again, might have also killed it,
versus the two gigahertz that is the standard. And with the 3200 megatransfer per second RAM,
it actually did do a fairly decent bump in performance. Like, yeah, it's not good.
Like, you're looking at like, Haswell level performance, maybe, but it's running at 2.5
gigahertz. If it was running at like 3.5 or 4, like that might actually be pretty fast. And the fan
on our cooler basically never spun. Like, it would spin when you like hit it with a load. I think
I only ever got it to like 60 or 70 degrees, maybe 80 with like, like the most prime 95 I
could throw at it. And then immediately the fan would stop after you're finished because it cooled
down immediately. Like, it's actually pretty cool. That's another consideration, I guess,
in the data center. You've got banks and banks of machines. This thing's sipping power. Right?
I don't know. Either way, I know that Jiaoxin used a lot of the development that was behind this
in their Silicon as well. And vice versa. There's actually the chip, like chipset parts of the system
are all labeled Jiaoxin, even though this is not a Jiaoxin product. So I'm guessing that either
Centaur supplied that too. And it's just known as Jiaoxin. Or Jiaoxin supplied it here. It's
interesting to see like a kind of missing link, because we had that other Jiaoxin CPU from a
little while ago that we knew then was based on Isaiah, but we didn't really know much about this.
And I think that might have been because we, this might not have even been announced at the time
we made that video. Come to think of it. So like, this is like what they were working on at that time.
I don't think it would have been successful had they actually launched it. But it would have been
interesting actually having another competitor, at least in some respects in the x86 market,
even if it's in the server or whatever. Kind of like the Intel Arc. It's like, yeah, it's not good,
but it's, it's a cool, it's a, it's like an interesting, I guess, product to begin, I guess.
Yeah, like, I'm really rooting for Arc because we've reached kind of a stagnation point with GPUs too.
It's not that the technology has slowed down in GPUs, it's that the pricing for performance
has slowed down dramatically. And in fact, backslid, like that's, that's the major problem. And also
the lack of like dedicated RAM, right? Like the 3060, the RTX 3060 came with 12 gigs of RAM.
And Linus got tripped up by that yesterday because like, oh yeah, the 4060s only got eight. That was
a big thing. Yeah, that was a big thing because the 3060 had 12. I don't know. It's, it's one of those
things where like, competition is always good. It's, it's never not good. I guess no, there's,
there's all, there are, I suppose, reasons why you wouldn't want competition.
Like what's one example? I'm trying to think it's probably going to be like a super political thing,
but like, you know, hospitals, I don't like that in the US. Oh, okay, that's fair.
You know, like, oh, I can't go to that hospital. It's outside of my network.
You know, I know I'm bleeding out, but can you please go to the one a couple of miles away?
Like, for products, competition is always good.
I mean, but aren't your products to the hospital?
Yes. No, like, like legitimately, like, unironically, yes. Hospitals are apparently selling
customers, like, I say customer, wow, patient data for like AI training and like ad targeting
Oh, I've heard this. I've heard this. This is crazy. Wow, this is so like.
Yeah, and it's not, it's not a few of them. It's like a lot of them. Yeah.
It's actually really bad. It's really tragic. I hate that, like, this happened under our watch,
but I'm pretty sure we didn't kill it. And the reason why is because that's screaming
from this coil. We heard that on set while it was still running. Oh, that was why,
why Linus actually finally turned it off because he was like, oh yeah, like we can hear that on
audio, right? And they get, yeah, that's coil wind. He just like flipped it off. He's like,
I'll just take it. I wanted to pick it up anyway for the end of it, right? So he did that.
And that was the last time it ever ran. In the small chance you get a fix, maybe you can do a
pickup. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna, I can't. I spent all afternoon yesterday performing CPR.
There's, there's not a whole lot else I can do. Like I checked the socket for bent pins.
There was one that was iffy. I fixed that. No, I cleaned the bottom of the CPU for the pads just
in case Linus had finger grease on it. And no, I tried, you know, pulling out the battery.
Whatever. I tried. Successfully pulled out the battery and held the scene off for clear,
which apparently on other versions of this board are like doing that, like holding CMOS clear
after pulling power and the battery for about 15 seconds. Brings them back to life. Not in this
case. So like I went through a whole bunch of stuff. Check the jumpers, making sure that they
were still okay. They're all the same as when we started shooting. So yeah, sadly, I don't think
there's anything that I'm going to be able to do. It's going to have to go back to the owner and see
if he can do some additional diagnostics. Hopefully you enjoyed watching this. I certainly enjoyed
rambling for more like 45 minutes. Really? Yeah, it's like quarter after 12.
Let us know if you really like this series and we'll keep doing it because I want to do more
of these. I want to rant at the camera a bit. I don't get the opportunity to do that if I'm just
doing an A-roll or like even if I put a rant in an A-roll Linus, it's just like, yeah, that's too
ranty or that's too harsh or that's too off topic. And I'm just like, it's not that off.
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