AS a handful of Texas-based design engineers departed, Taiwan's VIA Technologies confirmed that it plans to spin off the Cyrix unit it had acquired less than a year ago.

"While we're sorry to see these people leave, their departure will have no impact on our processor plans" —Richard Brown, VIA

The Cyrix engineers left VIA's design facility in Richardson, Texas, to go to a new networking-processor startup, Navarro Networks, run by Mark Bluhm, a former Cyrix vice president.

VIA said that it will run its new, as-yet-unnamed company as a wholly owned subsidiary based in Taiwan and will invest between $100 million and $300 million in it. The development comes about a month after VIA introduced the first product from its new PC CPU business and less than a year after it revealed that it would acquire the Cyrix operation from National Semiconductor Corp.

The company recently rolled out its Cyrix III processor based on the chip design that had been codenamed Gobi at National.

The developments apparently leave open the question of exactly what will happen to the Cyrix architecture. Since VIA's acquisition, Cyrix's already small market share has dwindled, mainly because low-end PC OEMs have migrated to the architectures of either Advanced Micro Devices or Intel Corp.

One unconfirmed report says that VIA officially canceled the next generation of the Cyrix architecture, codenamed Jalapeno, and also known as M3. "As far as I knew, Jalapeno was still alive and well," says Kevin Krewell, PC microprocessor analyst at Cahners MicroDesign Resources, Sebastopol, California. "This certainly brings up a lot of questions about what those who remain with the group in Richardson are going to do." Keith Diefendorff, editor-in-chief at MicroDesign Resources' publication, Microprocessor Report, was not surprised by the departures. "A lot of the Cyrix people had already left anyway, so I would interpret this as people leaving a ship that wasn't going anywhere anyway," he said.

Richard Brown, a VIA spokesman based in Taipei, says the departures, which could number from nine to 13, will not affect VIA's intention to press on in the processor business. "While we're sorry to see these people leave, their departure will have no impact on our processor plans," Brown says. "The VIA Cyrix III has already been launched and is fully on schedule, and we will continue to ramp up the clock speeds and performance of this part. We will also have additional products coming out from our Centaur team in Austin." Centaur is a separate CPU acquisition which came from US-based chipmaker Integrated Device Technologies Inc (IDT).

VIA's next PC microprocessor product, codenamed Samuel, is to be based on the WinChip 4 architecture, which VIA acquired from IDT following the Cyrix deal last summer. Another part, codenamed Matthew, is on VIA's roadmap for the first quarter of 2001, but now its status is unclear.

Arik Hesseldahl

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