TweakTown has posted a review on the VIA Cyrix 3 CPU at 600MHz and 650MHz clock speeds based on the Samuel 1 core (with no L2 cache) and Samuel 2 core (with L2 cache).
In 1999, VIA acquired Centaur, the makers of the Winchip CPU line. When the Centaur designers began they took the Winchip 3 processor and changed it around to work on the Socket 370 platform and reduced the die size to 0.18 micron, this new core was codenamed Samuel. The Samuel, like the Joshua didn´t include any L2 cache, again this hampered the performance of the Samuel CPU. After the Samuel core performed less than VIA had expected they took the Samuel core and added 64KB L2 cache, this greatly increased the performance of the CPU and shrank the die again to 0.15 micron, making it the worlds first 0.15 micron CPU.Read more
