Hacker Cinema
Rise of the Centaur
2015 · Film · documentary · 116 min
Directed by Carson Coots
"Give me ten million dollars and trust me, we'll deliver a low-cost microprocessor compatible with Intel". This was former IBM Fellow and Dell Senior VP Glenn Henry's 1995 pitch to start a microprocessor company focused on low-cost Intel-compatible processors ("x86"). This documentary follows Henry and his team as they race to complete their latest chip, and offers an inside look at Centaur's unique management environment.
4 positivefrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Just a heads up, there's a pretty good documentary about the early start period of that company called "Rise of the Centaur" if you ever get bored and want to reminisce on those days of Via/Centaur/alternative CPUs
I enjoyed "Rise of the Centaur", a documentary about a company that develops an intel compatible microprocessor.
Which hasn't kept them from building 64-bit cores with everything including AVX-512..
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its-new-server-class-x86-core-cns-adds-avx-512
IIRC you watch the "Rise of the Centaur" documentary they talk about the Intel lawsuit, and the corresponding counter suit that they won. Which makes the whole thing sound like MAD.
More interesting there is https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/kaixian
If anyone is interested in this sort of thing, I would highly recommend checking out the documentary Rise of the Centaur. It’s about a company that I previously hadn’t heard of who was making an x86 compatible CPU based in Austin TX.
They show a lot of the verification process throughout the film, including an exciting moment when the chip boots Windows for the first time.