I Was Never Meant to Have This Prototype CPU

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 sponsor I fix it if your favorite old console is on the fritz don't go replace it just yet give it a new leas on life with the help of iix it check out their game console Parts using the link down below [Music] 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 thread ripper 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 [Music] 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 when you purchase through the shopping tag right here you've seen how awesome this backpack is before and we are excited to announce you can now buy the definitive edition of the LTT backpack it's got the same 22 pockets and sleeves the same convenient features like an air tag pocket and RFID blocking passport pocket it's got more than enough space for all of your Tech and daily carry gear and features a resilient and fully recycled exterior Fabric and new today it ships with the bonded dual layer bottom and our upgraded titanium Carabiner zipper pulse thanks to YouTube shopping we're offering a limited deal where if you buy it through their link here on YouTube you can save 20% Which is 50 bucks this is a limited offer so grab it while you can hey look at that 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 buzzing noise coming from your console it's probably bad news but it's not the end of the world because iix it has the help you need from the newest PlayStation to the Xbox 360 which yes I'm sorry to tell you is considered retro now they have the parts to help you breathe new life into your favorite console and I mean it they got like everything replacement face plates power supplies thumb sticks screens they got it plus with their comprehensive guides all you need is a little DIY spirit I don't have sleeves to roll up and the daunting task of taking apart your console becomes a breeze so do your part to help reduce E-Waste by checking out iFixit game console Parts at the link down below if you guys enjoyed this 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

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,214,949

Keywords: cpu, processor, centaur, idt, centaur technology, integrated device technology, via, via technologies, via tech, mini itx, embedded, x86, ai, ml, machine learning, artificial intelligence, dl, deep learning, accelerator, ncore, motherboard, lga 2011-v3, intel, xeon, skylake-x, lawsuits, licensing, patents, prototype, unreleased, CNS, CHA, centaur hauls, CHA001

Id: VEQAgOe9i6Y

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024