Cyrix Returns

AnandTech has a review of the newest Cyrix CPU this morning. After several failed attempts to make anything that competes with AMD and Intel, VIA took over and produced the worlds first 0.15m x86 CPU. AnandTech benchmarked the new CPU, meant to compete with Durons and Celerons, in several applications and games (Quake3, MDK2 and Unreal Tournament). Is the latest effort from Cyrix any good for the price (700mhz for $56) ?

... With this in mind, we can only say that the third incarnation of the Cyrix III, the one based on the Samuel2 core, is destined to go the way of recent Cyrix products. In order for VIA to reach their goal of 10% market saturation, they will either have to drastically change the Cyrix III as it currently is or come out with a new product that is priced lower and performs better. The additional 64KB of L2 cache and the shrink to the 0.15 micron process do not seem to be not enough to save the Cyrix III from going the way of the dodo.