VIA Cyrix III (Joshua) processors
Introduction: February 2000
Overview
The VIA Cyrix III/C3 was a family of x86 central processing units for Socket 370 personal computers, designed by Centaur Technology and sold by VIA Technologies. The different CPU cores were built following the design methodology of Centaur Technology.
The VIA Cyrix III was later renamed VIA C3, as it was not built upon Cyrix technology at all.
The Joshua core
The pre-release Cyrix III CPUs were based upon a 22 million transistor Joshua core designed by Cyrix. This CPU core was a typical Cyrix CISC design with a very high IPC rate but rather low clock rates. To compensate this, Cyrix used a rating system with a higher "P-Rating" than the true clock rate to emphasize the higher performance of their designs compared to the competitors' offerings. This was controversial, however, because the PR ratings did not account for the very low floating point performance of the processor. When the chip reached reviewers, the CPU's performance was discovered to be low compared to the competition. And to intensify the negative attention, there were stability problems with the processor.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.