Centaur Technology
More info
- Creator
- Glenn Henry
- Released
- 1995–2021
- Owner
- IDT, then VIA Technologies (from 1999)
- Type
- CPU design house (x86)
A small team in Austin that spent a quarter of a century building x86 chips on a fraction of Intel's budget.
Glenn Henry, formerly of IBM and Dell, founded Centaur in 1995 with backing from IDT. The bet was that a small team could build a simple, cheap x86 processor by leaving most things out. The result, WinChip, arrived in 1997 and sold modestly. In 1999 VIA Technologies bought the company, gaining both the designers and an x86 licence.
Under VIA came the C3, C7 and Nano: low-power chips that ended up in thin clients, embedded boxes and Mini-ITX boards. Performance was rarely impressive, but Centaur was one of very few groups outside Intel and AMD shipping x86 at all. In 2021 Intel paid $125 million to hire the engineers, and Centaur was wound down.