NEVER OBSOLETE

[GiGaBiTe]

That was Cyrix's "Pentium Rating" or "Performance Rating" (PR). They claimed the 250 MHz MII was as fast as a 333 MHz Pentium II.

On purely integer performance, it wasn't entirely bad. But they still had the same recycled garbage FPU from their 486. If all you did was office and productivity stuff, it worked well if the rest of the system could cope with the weird 83 MHz bus. Since PCI would generally run at 41.5 MHz, it gave a decent speed boost to PCI devices that could tolerate the extra speed.

This continued even after VIA took over Cyrix. I had a VIA C3 Book PC that was advertised as "1 Giga Pro" (1 gigahertz processor) even though it actually runs at 667 MHz.

The VIA C3 never used PR ratings. You're probably confusing the power saving features, because the C3 could adjust its clock dynamically based on load. VIA called it "Longhaul" and it required OS support to work, probably a driver. AMD in its early clock ramping supporting CPUs needed a driver to work.

List of VIA C3 microprocessors - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Despite using the Cyrix name though, the cores were designed by Centaur Technologies, the same people behind the IDT Winchip.

 

[Unknown_K]

The IDT Winchips were garbage when they came out, at least Cyrix was king of the hill for maybe a year.

 

[vwestlife]

The VIA C3 never used PR ratings.

Not officially, but VIA allowed their customers to remark the chip to say anything they wanted, so PC Chips and a few laptop manufacturers put "1 Giga Pro" on the 667 MHz VIA C3.

See the BIOS screen at 4:55 in the video:

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Lol, typical ECS trash doing trash things.

If you still have that machine, it'd be interesting to pop off the tiny heatsink and see what the CPU actually is.

AMD was also affected by manufacturers rebadging CPUs. They shouldn't have exposed the strapping on the top of the CPU on the Athlon.