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Centaur Technology Tour in Pictures

Before VIA showed off their latest processor architecture this week, they gave us the "grand tour" of the Centaur offices in Texas. There is a lot more to this place than a bunch of engineers sitting around playing with their slide rules.

Introduction

If you have not read up on VIA’s new Centaur designed “CN / Isaiah” CPU, you really should. It is quite an impressive part that we will soon see in the UMPC and notebook space undoubtedly. While we were down visiting Centaur’s offices in Austin, Texas, we were given the full tour of the facility that is spread out over a few floors in a fairly sizeable office building hidden from clear view by a row of dense brush and huge trees.

I have been to more than a few factories where processors and other semiconductors are made in the last decade, but the trip to Centaur proved to be full of many “firsts” for me. Keeping in mind that Centaur is building CPUs up from the design level to actually testing them in-house is an amazing feat for a company with less than 100 employees. The one thing that is not done in the Centaur building is the actual fabrication of the processor die. VIA has that done by their partners that currently consist of Fujitsu, IBM, and TSMC. And of course full production is not done in this facility either, but most of the “test runs” are done here before sending the part out for final consumer-level production.

Join us below on our tour through the Centaur facility, just as we followed along this week. It proved to be quite interesting and simply amazing. Centaur made building a CPU look easy.

Inside Centaur Technology

While most companies don’t think they suck, apparently the Austin Business Journal does not think that Centaur sucks either, rating Centaur it #6 on the “Best Places to Work” list for 2006. Glenn Henry, president of Centaur, wholeheartedly expressed that keeping its employees happy is a huge cog in Centaur’s overall business philosophy. Also inside the front door you will find an antiquated computer from the late ‘60s amusingly labeled “Centaur C1A.” Both walls of the office’s main hallway are adorned with Centaur’s many patents.

Mr. Henry gives us our first look at the new Isaiah architecture, referred to as “CN” throughout the rest of our tour. Not only were there big pictures on the walls, but there were literally working samples to found all over test areas that had obviously been in use. The back of the CN is shown above and is in a ball grid array configuration. Currently no plans are being made for a land grid array or pinned CN processor. All initial CN processors will be soldered to the board they are shipped on, much like many current C7-D parts. In the final slide above you will notice the processor package with a smaller die. The smaller die part is a C7 processor built on a 90nm process. The new CN processor is obviously much bigger in size while being produced on a 65nm process. The CN has increased to 94 million transistors from the 25 million of its predecessor.

Here we see the CN being tested with logic analyzer probes integrated into a motherboard specially built for the task. The machine you see connected to a series of wires is reading exactly how the processor is reacting to the bus it is attached to. This logic analyzer machine is built by Tektronix. Some other companies use a machine in this process that sits between the processor and the motherboard, but Centaur thinks they get better data by not interjecting its test equipment into the bus they are trying to gather data from.

In these two pictures you again see the same monitoring system in place. At this station however they have introduced a pressure plate that is actually a TEC and a waterblock. Here they can monitor the processor bus as it reacts at different temperature loads.

This is John Carls and that is his “Harbinger” card. He fully designed the card himself in-house at Centaur. It actually emulates the CN processor. It only takes about 3 days to boot Windows XP. Charlie Demerjian, on Inquirer fame, noted that Vista could probably boot in less than a week then!

Moving along we see Centaur’s own raised floor data center. Centaur has invested in many Dell small form factor Pentium 4 and Core 2 machines to run software simulations on for processor testing.

Beyond that we moved into a set of offices that were focused on real world application testing. First in the door we found another system setup to stress cooling and wattage like we saw earlier, only this time the systems are testing CN processors on retail socketed motherboards.

Racks of systems were set up as well as individual systems at workers’ desks. I thought the heatsink pictured above was pretty nifty as it has a cam device used to easily twist it on and off the CPU. (You can mail me here to tell me how you have used and seen these all your life and I am an idiot for even pointing this out.) We saw CN processors being tested using some of the newest GPUs out from both AMD and NVIDIA.