Via wins big Wal-Mart Linux PC order

TAIWANESE SEMI firm Via has secured an order from massive shop Wal-Mart for two of its C3-Cyrix-Centaur X86 based processors.

The Economic News reports that Via and Wal-Mart will create two budget machines running flavours of the Linux OS.

There's also a plan for the chip company to make low cost sub $300 machines running Windows Eyecandy.

The article claims that Medion is also set to clinch a deal with Via, while Legend and the Founder Group also use some of the C3 processors.

Indeed, the article claims that Via is shipping as many as 300,000 C3s a month.

In further news, the article claims that Via is only demonstrating CPUs and mobos at the Comdex 2002 show and is not talking about Pentium 4 based chipsets at all. Perhaps there has been a development in this epic legal struggle we've missed.

That's what the Economic News says, but we're reliably informed that this part of the story isn't true, and that it's happily demoing a P4X600 and even chatted to our own Doug Mohney and others about the Pentium 4. µ