【转】Cyrix: Gone But Not Forgotten不在了但是没有被遗忘

2023-12-06 06:12 作者:小林家的垃圾王R 0人读过 | 我要投稿

Cyrix: Gone But Not Forgotten By Adrian Potoroaca November 3, 2022

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Most of you are no doubt familiar with Intel and AMD, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and possibly even VIA – but there's another precursor chip maker that you should be familiar with. For the better part of a decade, Cyrix brought the world of personal computing to millions in the form of attainable budget PCs, only to be killed by its best product and its inability to run a popular game, followed by a bad merger with a larger partner. The early 1990s were a strange time for the desktop computing industry. It looked like Intel was winning despite fierce competition in the microprocessor space; Apple switched to IBM's PowerPC architecture, while Motorola's 68K chips were slowly dragging Commodore's Amiga PC to the grave. Arm was only a tiny flame sparked by Apple and a few others, and was almost entirely focused on developing a processor for the infamous Newton.

This was around the same time AMD was liberating its processors from the negative aura of being second-sourced from Intel. After cloning a few more generations of Intel CPUs, AMD came up with its own architecture, which by the end of the nineties were well regarded in terms of price and performance. That success can be attributed at least in part to Cyrix, a company that had a window of opportunity to capture the home PC market and leave both Intel and AMD in the dust, but ultimately failed to execute and quickly disappeared into the tech graveyard. Modest Beginnings Cyrix was founded in 1988 by Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman, starting out as a manufacturer of high-speed x87 math co-processors for 286 and 386 CPUs. These were some of the greatest minds to leave Texas Instruments and they had high ambitions to take on Intel and beat them at their own game. Rogers embarked on an aggressive pursuit to find the best engineers in the US and proceeded to become an infamously hard-driving leader for a team of 30 people that were tasked with the impossible. The company's first math coprocessors outperformed Intel equivalents by ~50% while also being less expensive. This made it possible to pair an AMD 386 CPU and a Cyrix FastMath co-processor and get 486-like performance at a lower price, which caught the industry's attention and encouraged Rogers to take the next step and pursue the CPU market.

In 1992, Cyrix unveiled its first CPUs, the 486SLC and 486DLC, which were intended to compete with Intel's 486SX and 486DX. They were also pin-compatible with the 386SX and 386DX, meaning they could be used as drop-in upgrades on ageing 386 motherboards, and manufacturers were also using them to sell budget laptops. Both variants offered slightly worse performance that an Intel 486 CPU but significantly better performance than a 386 CPU. The Cyrix 486 DLC wasn't able to compete with Intel's 486SX offering clock-by-clock, but it was a fully 32-bit chip and sported 1KB of L1 cache, while costing significantly less.

At the time, enthusiasts loved the fact that they could use a 486DLC which ran at 33 Mhz to achieve comparable performance to that of an Intel 486SX running at 25 MHz. That said, it wasn't without problems, as it could lead to stability issues for some older motherboards that didn't have extra cache control lines or a CPU register control to enable or disable the on-board cache. Cyrix also developed a "direct replacement" variant called Cx486DRu2, and later on in 1994 released a "clock doubled" version called Cx486DRx2, which had the cache coherency circuitry integrated into the CPU itself. By then, however, Intel had released its first Pentium CPU, which drove 486DX2 prices down to the point where the Cyrix alternative had lost its appeal as it was cheaper to upgrade to a 486 motherboard than it was to buy a Cyrix upgrade processor for an old 386 motherboard. When the "clock tripled" 486DX4 arrived in 1995, it was too little, too late.

Large PC manufacturers such as Acer and Compaq weren't convinced by Cyrix's 486 CPUs and instead opted for AMD's 486 processors. This still didn't stop Intel from spending years in court alleging that Cx486 violated its patents, without ever winning a case. Cyrix and Intel eventually settled outside of court and the latter agreed that Cyrix had the right to manufacture its own x86 designs in foundries that happened to hold an Intel cross-license, such as Texas Instruments, IBM, and SGS Thomson (later STMicroelectronics). Never Repeat the Same Trick Twice... Unless You Are Cyrix Intel launched the Pentium processor in 1993, based on a new P5 microarchitecture and finally coming up with a market-friendly name. But more importantly, it raised the bar in terms of performance that ushered in a new era of personal computing. The novel superscalar architecture allowed it to complete two instructions per clock, a 64-bit external data bus made it possible to read and write more data on each memory access, the faster floating point unit was capable of up to 15 times the throughput of the 486 FPU, and several other niceties. Cyrix took on the challenge to yet again create a middle ground for Socket 3 motherboards that were not able to handle the new Pentium CPU, before that model was even ready to ship. That middle ground was the Cyrix 5x86, which at 75 MHz offered many of the features of fifth-generation processors like the Pentium and AMD's K5.

Cyrix 5x86 CPU with heatsink. Image: NostalgiaNerd The company even made 100 MHz and 133 MHz versions, but they didn't really have all the advertised performance-enhancing features since they would cause instability if enabled, and overclocking potential was limited. All of these were short-lived and in six months Cyrix decided to stop selling them and moved on to a different processor design. Peak Cyrix Through the Lens of Quake In 1996, Cyrix unveiled the 6x86 (M1) processor, which was expected to be yet another drop-in replacement for older Intel CPUs on Socket 5 and Socket 7 motherboards with decent performance. But this wasn't just an upgrade path for budget systems, it was actually a little marvel in CPU design that was thought to do the impossible – it combined a RISC core with many of the design aspects of a CISC one. At the same time, it continued to use native x86 execution and ordinary microcode, while Intel's Pentium Pro and the AMD K5 relied on dynamic translation to micro-operations. The Cyrix 6x86 was pin-compatible with the Intel P54C and had six variants with a confusing naming scheme that was supposed to indicate the expected performance level, but wasn't an actual indicator of clock speed. For instance, the 6x86 PR166+ only ran at 133 MHz, and was marketed as being equivalent to or better than a Pentium running at 166 MHz, a strategy that AMD would replicate later on.

Be that as it may, the problem was that the 6x86 actually identified itself as a 486 CPU because it didn't support the full Intel P5 instruction set. This would quickly become an issue as most application development was slowly migrating towards P5 Pentium-specific optimizations to squeeze more performance using the new instructions. Cyrix eventually improved compatibility with the Pentium and Pentium Pro through the 6x86MX and 6x86MII variants. A huge selling point of the 6x86 was that its integer performance was significantly better than the Pentium's, which was a good advantage to have at a time when the vast majority of applications and games relied on integer operations. For a while, Cyrix even tried to charge a premium for that added performance, but eventually that strategy fell apart.

Cyrix 6x86MX CPU die shot As it turned out, the FPU (floating point unit) of the 6x86 was only a slightly modified version of Cyrix's 80387 coprocessor, and as such, significantly slower than the new FPU design integrated by Intel's Pentium and Pentium Pro. To be fair, it was still anywhere between two and four times faster than the Intel 80486 FPU, and the Cyrix 6x86 bested the Intel offerings on overall performance. But that whole equation broke down when software developers, particularly those making 3D games, saw the rising popularity of the Pentium and chose to optimize their code in assembly language around the advantages of the P5 FPU.

When id Software released Quake in 1996, PC gamers using 6x86 processors discovered they were getting sub-par frame rates that reached at most, an unplayable 15 frames per second, unless they wanted to drop the resolution down to 320 by 200, in which case you'd have needed a top of the line, Cyrix 6x86MX PR2/200 CPU to get a playable 29.7 frames per second. Meanwhile, gamers with Intel systems had no problem running the game at playable frame rates even at 640 by 480. John Carmack had figured out that he could overlap integer and floating point operations on Pentium chips, as they used different parts of the P5 core for everything except instruction loading. That technique didn't work on the Cyrix core, which exposed the weakness of its FPU. Reviewers at the time found that in every other benchmark or performance test, the 6x86 CPU would leapfrog the Pentium by 30 to 40 percent. Back in the mid 90s, no one knew the exact direction that computing would take, and Cyrix thought it was best to prioritize integer performance, so it produced a processor that lacked instruction pipelining, a feature that would become an essential part of a desktop CPU. Instruction pipelining is a technique that divides tasks into a set of smaller operations that are then executed by different parts of the processor simultaneously, in a more efficient fashion. The FPU of the Pentium processor was pipelined, leading to a very low latency for floating point calculations to handle the graphics of Quake. The problem was easy to solve and software developers have released patches for their applications and games. But id Software had spent too much time designing Quake around the P5 microarchitecture and never provided such a fix. AMD's K5 and K6 CPUs fared a little better than Cyrix's, but they were still inferior than Intel's offerings when it came to Quake, which was a really popular game and a flagship among a new breed of 3D titles. This had Cyrix CPUs becoming harshly judged on that performance gap, and the company all but lost credibility in the eyes of many enthusiasts. Because the company had been unable to score contracts with large PC OEMs, it was a particularly hard blow for Cyrix's fierce customer base that was made up of those same enthusiasts.

To make matters worse, Cyrix was a fabless chip maker that relied on third parties to manufacture its processors, and those companies used their most advanced lines for their own products. As a result, Cyrix processors were manufactured on a 600 nm process node while Intel's were 300 nm. Efficiency suffered, and this is also why Cyrix CPUs had a reputation for getting extremely hot – so much so that enthusiasts were designing hotplates using them as a heat element. They were overly sensitive to low-quality power supplies, and their overclocking potential was also limited, but that didn't stop people (like this author, whose second PC had a Cyrix 6x86-P166+ CPU inside) from pushing them just a little bit and slowly leading them to their demise. The Fall of the First True Rival to Intel's CPU Hegemony By 1997, Cyrix had tried everything in their power to forge a partnership with companies like Compaq and HP, as integrating its CPUs into their systems would have generated a steady income stream. It also tried suing Intel for infringing its patents on power management and register renaming techniques, but the matter was settled quickly with a mutual cross-license agreement, so that the two firms could stay focused on producing better CPUs.

A famous National Semiconductor ad The litigation took a toll on the already cash-strapped company. Faced with the prospect of bankruptcy, Cyrix agreed to be merged into National Semiconductor. This was seen as a blessing. The company would finally have access to proper manufacturing plants and a strong marketing team that was able to score large contracts. The IBM manufacturing agreements held on for a while, but Cyrix eventually moved all production to National Semiconductor. Faced with the prospect of bankruptcy, Cyrix agreed to be merged into National Semiconductor. Yet as it turns out this move would seal Cyrix's fate. National Semiconductor wasn't interested in making high performance PC parts, and instead wanted low-power SoCs (system on a chip). Sure enough, Cyrix came up with the universally-hated 5x86 MediaGX, a chip that integrated functions like audio, video, and memory controller with a 5x86 core running at 120 or 133 MHz. It was a low performer, but it managed to convince Compaq to use it in their low-end Presario computers. This whet other OEM's appetite for 6x86 CPUs, with Packard Bell and eMachines as notable examples.

The shift in focus didn't stop Cyrix from trying to produce more high-performance CPUs, but it delivered promises and little else. National Semiconductor eventually sold Cyrix to Taiwan-based chipset maker VIA Technologies, but by then key people had already left and the MII CPU was an uninteresting part that found no buyers. The last Cyrix design was the MII-433GP which ran at 300 MHz and, thanks to the unfortunate naming scheme, ended up in comparisons with processors that ran at 433 MHz, which were vastly superior. AMD and Intel were busy racing to 1 GHz and beyond, and it would take 20 more years for Arm to come along and challenge the two giants in the desktop and server markets – not to mention totally dominate mobile computing. VIA put the final nail in the coffin as it used the Cyrix name to replace "Centaur" branding on processors that actually used an IDT-designed WinChip3 core. National Semiconductor kept selling the MediaGX for a few more years, before rebranding it into Geode and selling the design to AMD in 2003. Three years later, AMD demonstrated the world's lowest-power x86-compatible CPU, which took only 0.9 watts of power and was based on the Geode core, a testament to the ingenuity of the Cyrix design team. Why Cyrix's Legacy Matters Whether or not you ever owned a Cyrix-powered PC, the company should be remembered for its legacy and lessons learned. Despite the relatively small influence on the industry during its decade of existence, Cyrix's failures proved that improving IPC (instructions-per-clock) was a more productive endeavor for chip makers compared to improving raw clock speeds. To this day, Intel and AMD have tried to push nominal clock speeds higher with each generation, but after the 3 GHz milestone, most of the real improvements have come from rethinking core parts of their microarchitectures (and caching). A notable example is AMD's Zen progression, which has brought single-threaded performance improvements of 68% in less than four years.

Cyrix was able to survive and overcome a lot of legal (and by extension, financial) pressure from Intel, who sued almost everyone in the CPU space in the 1990s. It showed on two occasions that litigation is detrimental for a healthy marketplace while cross-licensing deals lead to a lot of cross-pollination between engineering efforts at different companies, which proved beneficial. Cyrix also operated as a fabless company before that was cool. These days it's standard practice for most silicon giants, including the likes of AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, Apple, Marvell, Unigroup China, and HiSilicon, who depend on other companies to manufacture their chips. Cyrix operated as a fabless company before that was cool.

The company's marketing strategy was never great before the National Semiconductor merger, and AMD would repeat the same mistakes with Athlon and Sempron processors in the 2000s. These were labeled as to indicate that they were faster than an Intel processor, while operating at a lower clock speed, but that didn't always translate well in benchmarks or real-world performance tests. AMD dropped that scheme, but suffice to say, things remain a bit confusing to this day. Today, it's unlikely you'll find a Cyrix processor outside of gold reclaiming operations and enthusiasts' vintage computer collections. There's some evidence online that Cyrix-based desktops were in use up until at least 2010, meaning they lingered for another decade after the company had essentially dissolved into VIA Technology's soup. It's unlikely that VIA's Zhaoxin arm still uses anything coming from the original Cyrix design, but only time will tell if they learned the lessons to honor Cyrix's legacy.

TechSpot's Gone But Not Forgotten Series The story of key hardware and electronics companies that at one point were leaders and pioneers in the tech industry, but are now defunct. We cover the most prominent part of their history, innovations, successes and controversies.

3Dfx Interactive
OCZ Technology
Palm
Gateway 2000
Commodore
Sinclair Computers
Compaq
Cyrix
Silicon Graphics (SGI)
Intellivision
S3 Graphics
Coleco
Nokia
Rendition
NexGen
BlackBerry
ATI Technologies

Note: This feature was originally published on December 2021. We have revised its content and bumped it due to its historical significance and old school computing nature, as part of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative. Image credit: Cyrix 486 dx2 masthead by Henry Mühlpfordt, Cyrix product boxes by CPU Shack. If you enjoy our content, please consider subscribing.

User Comments: 58

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Didou Nov 17, 2020, 7:03 AM You can find some VIA (Cyrix) Crusoe CPU based systems in use here in certain small form factors like display screens in the subway or buses. 2 people liked this

Mowserx Nov 17, 2020, 7:24 AM Nice article! How about something similar for Transmeta? 7 people liked this

Morphine Child Nov 17, 2020, 7:35 AM Had Cyrix CPU in my very first computer, was 133MHz if I remember correctly. Was old as Jesus when I got it from my cousin from Germany who was already in Pentium era. Still, served me well since I had no idea what I was doing. 7 people liked this

Aryassen Nov 17, 2020, 8:02 AM Great read, thank you for posting it. I also had some fond memories of the era Cyrix was operating in, but had first hand experience only with one of their their later models (MKIII I think?). Although, I did have a co-processor from them in the early days, I just didn't realise it was faster than the one from Intel (it didn't make my tasks or games running faster, but made me prouder for sure

). I always rooted for Cyrix to stay relevant, and was a bit sad to see them gone. With Socket 7 board, you really did have a wide choice of chips, from 3 manufacturers, and that, in hindsight, feels priceless... 9 people liked this

Wrinkle Nov 17, 2020, 8:11 AM Ah friend of mine had a 6x86 and if you think AMD and Intel fanboys are insufferable now, Cyrix fans took it to a whole new level. I still remember the angry rants against Wintel (of course he ran OS/2) and the arguments why Cyrix was theoretically better. 1 person liked this

wiyosaya Nov 17, 2020, 9:38 AM Back in the day, I had a 486SX and I used a Cyrix math co-processor with it as I had heard that it was a better math co-processor than the Intel math co-processor. EDIT: IIRC, that PC was my very first PC compatible build. I've never stopped building my own systems since then. 4 people liked this

Stiqy Nov 17, 2020, 10:53 AM The article is a good explanation for the existence of the very clear "Intel Inside" branding that emerged. And also why it was successful. 7 people liked this

Arbie Nov 17, 2020, 10:58 AM A great read, thank you. My eMachines PC had a Cyrix CPU, and taught me to not buy low-end systems. 2 people liked this

DrSuess Nov 17, 2020, 11:32 AM Had a 6x86 and I still regret not buying a Pentium to this day. I have bought only Intel since then until last year when I bought a AMD Threadripper system, which I definitely don't regret..

BadThad Nov 17, 2020, 11:50 AM Great article, brought back some old memories! I used many of the Cyrix CPU's as they were significantly less expense than the Intel CPU's of the time. 9 people liked this

BoowieBear Nov 17, 2020, 2:15 PM I always rooted for the underdog in computing as the competition is essential to progress being high and prices remaining low. That being said...these chips were dogs. I sold these at Best Buy and they were always in the worst machines which didn't help. CTX, eMachines, Presario. That MediaGx was awful. How they let that out in the market was amazing. Though it did usher in the $1000 desktop. Great article.

brucek Nov 17, 2020, 2:21 PM Loved seeing all the old ads, brought me back to a different time and place for a bit. Thanks! 6 people liked this

Raytrace3D Nov 17, 2020, 4:39 PM Brings back some memories... For a brief time I had a Cyrix 5x86 100... it was slow... even then. lol

Darth Shiv Nov 17, 2020, 7:16 PM Had one. Upgraded my DX2-80 to a 166+ iirc. It melted. 1 person liked this

psycros Nov 17, 2020, 7:52 PM My Cyrix rig was absolutely BLAZING but there were programs it simply could not run. Ultimately it wasn't an acceptable trade-off. 1 person liked this

Numer 0b0111 Nov 18, 2020, 10:52 AM Great article! Brings back memories, specifically of this Make-it 486 – 286 Upgrade kit ( [link] ) which was a drop-in replacement for socketed 80286 CPUs. Talk about a mind-melt... I had one! It mostly worked in that it significantly sped up a 286-based PC I had at the time. However, Windows 3.0 would NOT run in 386-enhanced mode, IIRC. There definitely were some compatibility issues... 1 person liked this

Bigweedroot Nov 18, 2020, 5:18 PM I had Cyrix 586 as my second PC after ditching my first PC with 12mhz Intel and 287 coprocessor. I dont recall having any problems with Cyrix until I get tired of its speed and limited RAM as I moved up to Amd 266mhz then 1.7ghz and now quadcore Amd Kaveri ever since. Cyrix was my "Pentium equivalent" chip but it was really a 486 chip all along if I am right , It was a long time ago. I think I still have the case withCyrix in storage.. Anyone interested? it is still running great.. doubt it is worth $19 to anyone.. can be great for playing DOS games, tho. 1 person liked this

Darth Shiv Nov 18, 2020, 9:38 PM psycros said My Cyrix rig was absolutely BLAZING but there were programs it simply could not run. Ultimately it wasn't an acceptable trade-off. Blazing is a good word choice 1 person liked this

MaxSmarties Nov 22, 2020, 11:36 AM One of the worst purchase of my career, the 6X86 P166+. After a very few months of use it revealed itself for what it was: a poor CPU good just for Integer operations. Quake put it into big embarrassment. I replaced with a P133 ...

Duckeenie Nov 22, 2020, 3:13 PM Interesting read. The image used to illustrate Quake is from the third instalment of the game and not the first game which is referenced in the article. 1 person liked this

Darth Shiv Nov 22, 2020, 8:35 PM MaxSmarties said One of the worst purchase of my career, the 6X86 P166+. After a very few months of use it revealed itself for what it was: a poor CPU good just for Integer operations. Quake put it into big embarrassment. I replaced with a P133 ... Yeah was an ok upgrade from a 486... Intel were pretty strong back then but pricey. Think I held on until P3-800 or so... the Coppermine CPUs with an eye on upgrading to Tualatin if a 1400MHz or whatever was cheap. Which it never was! Think I stayed away from P4s and went AMD for a chip or two after that. P3 architecture iirc was very solid. IPC far far better than P4. Less stalling. Smaller pipelines. 1 person liked this

misor Nov 23, 2020, 6:22 AM Cyrix was founded in 1988 by Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman, starting out as a manufacturer of high-speed, x87 math co-processors for 286 and 386 processors. is the "x87" a typographical error or what? --- my precious pentium 166mhz pc.

neeyik Nov 23, 2020, 8:06 AM Staff misor said is the "x87" a typographical error or what? At the time, x87 was the instruction subset of x86, that handled floating point calculations. CPUs have use a combined instruction set for years now, under the general umbrella of x86. 2 people liked this

Makste Nov 25, 2020, 3:27 PM Nice read thanks 1 person liked this

Tyrchlis Mar 28, 2021, 10:12 PM This story brings back much remembered pain of that era. So much hope, so much disappointment!

Avro Arrow Mar 29, 2021, 8:19 AM I remember when these were out. I wanted to get one but they went belly-up before I could. Back then, tech didn't advance nearly as quickly as it does today and upgrades weren't done nearly as frequently. It was a joint venture between IBM and Texas Instruments. I wonder who ended up with the x86 licence because whoever has it could theoretically become a fourth player in the x86 market. 1 person liked this

amadeus777999 Jul 23, 2021, 5:22 AM Still have various 486- & Pentium-(also the 60&66) systems stored/running at home. Total joy to use with old(er) software and CRTs. Great article - the 5x86 was a beast.

Kgon1 Oct 4, 2021, 12:28 PM Avro Arrow said I wonder who ended up with the x86 licence because whoever has it could theoretically become a fourth player in the x86 market. China ! "The Zhaoxin joint venture processors, released from 2014, are based on the VIA Nano series." This is a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government.[2] The company creates x86-compatible CPUs. They paid Via to use x86 and are coming out with NEW x86 chips with DDR5 and PCIe4, if they can get TSMC to make them! 1 person liked this

Avro Arrow Oct 5, 2021, 9:36 AM Kgon1 said China ! "The Zhaoxin joint venture processors, released from 2014, are based on the VIA Nano series." This is a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government.[2] The company creates x86-compatible CPUs. They paid Via to use x86 and are coming out with NEW x86 chips with DDR5 and PCIe4, if they can get TSMC to make them! Expand quote Expand quote China? I think that you've been watching too much Fox News. You're right that VIA did buy most of what was left of Cyrix (I knew that but my memory isn't as good as it was 20 years ago...

) but VIA isn't Chinese. It was originally American but moved its HQ to Taipei. Being an order of magnitude smaller than Intel and AMD made competitive R&D impossible and so VIA was relegated to embedded niche systems like ATMs and cash registers. VIA did partner with the Chinese government on their own x86 CPUs but the licence isn't China's, it's VIA's. This is American-style corporate-industrial capitalism at its best. Without being big enough to compete in the PC market, VIA's x86 licence largely went unused. The Chinese government probably offered a crap-tonne of money (money that originally came from people like you and me who have purchased products made in China) for VIA to develop a CPU for their domestic use. Since VIA did legally own an x86 licence and only money matters in American-style capitalism, of course VIA jumped at the chance. So no, China did NOT get the licence. What China did was contract a semiconductor corporation to design an x86 CPU for their specific use. China did NOT get VIA's licence. Man, sometimes I wonder just how well people are programmed. The US corporate media has people yelling "China" today, "Iran" two years ago, "Russia" five years ago and ten years ago they were yelling "Terrorists". Who's going to be your next boogeyman, India, Brazil, Canada?

3 people liked this

wiyosaya Dec 30, 2021, 11:07 AM Avro Arrow said Who's going to be your next boogeyman, India, Brazil, Canada?

That depends on the conservatives and the GOP!

2 people liked this

Lionvibez Dec 30, 2021, 12:34 PM Article brings back from fond memories. My first computer build was a 386 I remember also owning a cyrix machine back in like the pentium 1 days.

Avro Arrow Dec 30, 2021, 1:04 PM wiyosaya said That depends on the conservatives and the GOP!

Along with CNN, NYT, (insert prefix here)NBC, FOX, OAN, WaPo, etc. It's "all about the Benjamins" to them.

Arbie Dec 30, 2021, 4:22 PM Excellent review article; thanks.

Mugsy Dec 30, 2021, 5:06 PM "The novel superscalar architecture allowed it to complete two instructions per clock." Cyrix's greatest architectural claim to fame barely earned a single line in your retrospective. This was the predecessor to "multi-threading" (and multi-core) CPU architecture. It's why Intel snapped up what was left of Cyrix as soon as they went bankrupt. 1 person liked this

hwertz Dec 30, 2021, 10:21 PM I had one of the earlier Cyrix chips, the 486 one had 486 performance but only address pins for 16MB like a 386, this worked great until I got a VESA Local Bus video card and found out it mapped over like megs 10-12 or something of my system memory (I'd start X, load enough software and start having the code overwrite the video memory, then of course it's crash before long.) Upgrade to a socket 7 board then... I had a few Socket 7 ones, in Linux they were nothing special performance-wise but very good price for the performance they did have, up through about mid-range (where the Cyrix chips cut off), you could get an Intel chip or get a Cyrix with like twice the performance for the same cost, so I did that. I switched to AMD K5 ("PR75", they'd switched to performance ratings by then just like Cyrix..), a K6, and then a K6-2... I ran that 450mhz K6-2 a long time, the code GCC spit out REALLY agreed with whatever caches and pipelines that thing had, it ran about dead even with a 900mhz P3. 1 person liked this

dsilvermane Dec 31, 2021, 7:18 AM This was such a nostalgic read. My second ever CPU was a Cyrix 6x86MX-PR2/233+. It had a whole 32MB RAM alongside a 1MB VGA card I salvaged from my previous system which had an Intel 486-DX4 and 16MB RAM. Those were the days... 1 person liked this

casteve Jan 1, 2022, 6:32 AM National's purchase (not merger) of Cyrix was a bad deal all around. Cyrix stopped going after the higher end business, the SoC stuff failed to take off, and National's core business took a hit - they were an analog partner of Intel and had advance access to motherboard reference designs. After the purchase, Intel killed all access and crippled a large portion of National's high profit margin power management, audio, and thermal sensor sales into the PC sector. 1 person liked this

Vanderlinde Jan 2, 2022, 10:02 AM Cyrix CPU's scored very well in 'businesss' related tasks, however when you put a game like Quake onto it, it suffered severely to unplayable games. They where however a great value, lots of these company's in the 286, 386 and 486 era used to reverse engineer intel all over the place, even AMD untill they start their own "Pentium" brand which is in latin, '5th'. The Cyrix PR 233+ I had on a socket 7, ran at 166Mhz if I'm correct. It would overclock to 183Mhz with just a simple FSB increase, but 200Mhz was'nt stable. The heatsink / fan combination that ran these things was at the limit pretty much. Ive experimented with watercooling for the first time back then. Dont ask how I assembled, but I pretty much glued 2 hoses into a heatsink and covered the heatsink completely up with glue. It would have waterflow as driven by a simple aquarium pump but with no radiator. Did'nt last a few days before the glue gave up and started to leak all over the place lol. From that point on I replaced it with a Slot A Athlon 600Mhz. Complete world of difference. 1 person liked this

Logic11 Jan 3, 2022, 12:54 AM Let's not overlook one of the BIGGEST issues Cyrix had: The IHS's on those chips were very concave! 'Hollow like a teaspoon!' was what I exclaimed after 1st putting a straight-edge on one. Lapping the IHS (and equally bad HSFs of the time) and adding (unheard of at the time) thermal compound allowed one to run the processors at a frequency of around or above their PR rating #s. This 'unleashed the beast'! [image link] Also if you: * Added 256 to 512kb of 15ns L2 cache to the cheap boards they came in. (Remember all the fake L2 cache..?) * Upped the FSB to 83.3MHz (to get frequencies up to the PR rating #) Then they were well able to compete with the Intel P1's of the time. Even in gaming! I recall trying to contact them to say as much, but to no avail. Sad...

theruck Jan 3, 2022, 3:36 AM Anybody noticed how the author praised AMD in an article about Cyrix?

tesmith47 Jan 4, 2022, 9:35 PM I was one of the poor folk back in those days, Cyrix low cost allowed me to get into computers. the game players / entertainment need for speed aspect of computers is what really killed cyrix

tesmith47 Jan 4, 2022, 9:37 PM Arbie said A great read, thank you. My eMachines PC had a Cyrix CPU, and taught me to not buy low-end systems. did it fail?

tesmith47 Jan 4, 2022, 9:45 PM Avro Arrow said China? I think that you've been watching too much Fox News. You're right that VIA did buy most of what was left of Cyrix (I knew that but my memory isn't as good as it was 20 years ago...

Expand quote Expand quote actually our capitalist force us into buying china made stuff by holding our salary so low AND moving production of most stuff to china 1 person liked this

Arbie Jan 4, 2022, 11:42 PM tesmith47 said did it fail? The PSU did, but what I'm referring to is that the PC had no expandability or upgradeability. So - having bought the bottom, I was stuck there. Making that even worse was that eMachines or maybe Cyrix had cut the actual clock speed from what the CPU was labeled as. Except for the clock speed lie it had a legitimate market. My mistake was in relying on my experience with cars, where you could buy cheap and bolt on go-faster parts. Not the same thing with pre-built computers.

Avro Arrow Jan 5, 2022, 11:25 AM tesmith47 said actually our capitalist force us into buying china made stuff by holding our salary so low AND moving production of most stuff to china I couldn't agree more. Wages have been stagnant for around 40 years and the way that they placated us in that time was selling us cheaper and cheaper crap. It used to be that if you bought a refrigerator, it would run forever but it cost more. The thing is, people were able to afford it. Now, they just throw their names on some imported item made in a sweatshop with slave labour. They don't care because they pocket even more loot than before and we're not suffering enough to really notice. There was a time when Levi's actually made their jeans in the USA. I saw a pair of Calvin Klein khakis at Costco that were made in Mauritius. This is why I've never been a brand-bot. I know that it's all marketing BS. When I buy something, I ignore the brand-name and look at the specifications. The best thing that this pandemic has done is show just how broken the capitalist system has become. The problem with capitalism has always been that the nature of competition is such that there's always a winner and at least one loser. Capitalism ends in monopoly or an oligopoly that has a few colluding players. The whims of the market no longer control the corporations. The whims of the corporations now control the market because they've become so large and powerful that they can effectively lock out anyone from entering the market as a new competitor. That results in market stagnation and consumer acceptance of the status quo (since they have no choice). The same thing happens with labour because there are no new and dynamic companies in any extant sector that are looking for new talent and willing to pay for it. If you're interested in seeing the shenanigans that these corporations like to pull, the CBC has two shows that are paragons of investigative journalism. They're called Marketplace and The Fifth Estate. Marketplace is made by CBC News and is more aimed at the ground-level between businesses and consumers. The Fifth Estate is a standalone show that produces documentaries revealing upper-echelon political and corporate corruption. Here's Marketplace on YouTube: CBC's Marketplace Here's The Fifth Estate: CBC's The Fifth Estate Hours upon hours of great investigative journalism that will make you see the world more clearly. It's a shame that there are no equivalents to them in other countries (none that I could find anyway).

tesmith47 Jan 5, 2022, 11:30 AM Avro Arrow said I couldn't agree more. Wages have been stagnant for around 40 years and the way that they placated us in that time was selling us cheaper and cheaper crap. It used to be that if you bought a refrigerator, it would run forever but it cost more. The thing is, people were able to afford it. Now, they just throw their names on some imported item made in a sweatshop with slave labour. They don't care because they pocket even more loot than before and we're not suffering enough to really notice. There was a time when Levi's actually made their jeans in the USA. I saw a pair of Calvin Klein khakis at Costco that were made in Mauritius. This is why I've never been a brand-*****. I know that it's all marketing BS. When I buy something, I ignore the brand-name and look at the specifications. The best thing that this pandemic has done is show just how broken the capitalist system has become. The problem with capitalism has always been that the nature of competition is such that there's always a winner and at least one loser. Capitalism ends in monopoly or an oligopoly that has a few colluding players. The whims of the market no longer control the corporations. The whims of the corporations now control the market because they've become so large and powerful that they can effectively lock out anyone from entering the market as a new competitor. That results in market stagnation and consumer acceptance of the status quo (since they have no choice). The same thing happens with labour because there are no new and dynamic companies in any extant sector that are looking for new talent and willing to pay for it. Expand quote Expand quote capitalism is not broken, it is working just as designed, just a lot of us did not/ do not understand what the design is!!

Avro Arrow Jan 5, 2022, 12:25 PM tesmith47 said capitalism is not broken, it is working just as designed, just a lot of us did not/ do not understand what the design is!! The design is the eventual complete domination of the world's economy by the few. Corporations that are more powerful than actual governments are the result. Capitalism was designed to move the power of the people from the ballot box where it benefits the most people to the marketplace where it benefits the richest (and therefore, the fewest). It's a psychopath's dream come true. All it needs is to be properly regulated but it's clear that most governments today are too corrupt to do so. The Nordic countries are the exception to this and while the French government is corrupt enough to do nothing, the French mindset of unity and the power of their labour unions means that they can shut the country down if they want to (and they have, several times). Funny how a McDonald's employee in Denmark can start at $20USD per hour with 4 weeks vacation despite McDonald's paying FAR MORE corporate tax there than in the USA but somehow, McDonald's in the USA "can't afford" to do the same. Meanwhile, if McDonald's wasn't profitable in Denmark, they wouldn't be there so they're making plenty of money. That's all you need to know about capitalism. It's fine when properly regulated but the difference between a "legitimate" business and a criminal empire is no longer about what they do but who they successfully pay off. 1 person liked this

Nintenboy01 Jan 6, 2022, 8:30 AM Like someone said before, an article on Transmeta would be nice. I remember seeing a lot of ads for cheap laptops with the Transmeta Crusoe processor back in the early to mid-2000s

Ojref Jan 9, 2022, 10:58 AM All these years later, and I still smack my forehead when I think back and remember how the company that broke the scene with one of the fastest x87 FPU drop-ins ended up completely ham-fisting the 6x86 with a sub-par FPU.

Puiu Elite Jan 10, 2022, 5:49 AM If I remember correctly my first PC I got as a kid in the 90s had an 6x86 in it. The nostalgia is strong with this one.

Lionvibez Nov 3, 2022, 11:54 AM Damn memories one of the first computers I ever owned had a cyrix chip in it.

bobalazs Nov 4, 2022, 12:14 AM Yay! Good to see that marvel over here. I happened to own a P166, and I loved it.

Pop Mihai Ioan Nov 4, 2022, 3:13 AM Very nice article!

Endarial Nov 5, 2022, 9:22 PM My family's first Windows PC was an Acer Aspire, powered by a Cyrix 100Mhz cpu. It had 8MB of RAM, a 1GB HDD and 1MB of onboard video memory. We eventually upgraded it to 32MB of RAM and I put in a 4MB Diamond Monster Voodoo card. I still have many fond memories of that computer.

Vanderlinde Nov 7, 2022, 1:00 AM The company's marketing strategy was never great before the National Semiconductor merger, and AMD would repeat the same mistakes with Athlon and Sempron processors in the 2000s. These were labeled as to indicate that they were faster than an Intel processor, while operating at a lower clock speed, but that didn't always translate well in benchmarks or real-world performance tests. AMD dropped that scheme, but suffice to say, things remain a bit confusing to this day. Expand quote Errrr.... AMD compared the whole PR rating against it's own CPU's. It was never aimed at Intel but coincidencely it did perform better as a Intel Pentium (4).. The PR rating was there because pure clockspeeds did'nt cut it. We had IPC and people where so small-minded thinking a 3Ghz Pentium 4 must have bin faster against a 2400 Athlon XP or so. The Cyrix CPU's where good "business" or "office" type of CPU's and fared very well but lacked true FPU power compared to Intel or AMD, which lacked them of running games well such as quake that required good FPU. I owned one too. PR200, internally running at 166Mhz. A simple OC to 183Mhz would yield a PR233, and even back then a simple increase of 13Mhz would mean the world in some apps or games. They where a great value, but coud'nt cut it against the ongoing rival of both AMD and Intel.

usebettertek Nov 7, 2022, 10:18 AM They were indeed incredible CPUs. I used them almost exclusively back in the day. AMD was my 2nd favorite to Cyrix. It was back during a time when you could think out of the box and come up with a lower cost alternative that didn't adhere to the "standard". I miss those days.

mosu Nov 15, 2022, 5:33 PM I did have a Cyrix 6x86 PR166+ in my first personal computer back in 1997, then it was replaced by an AMD Athlon 1800+ a few years later.

BrwPCnrd87 Nov 30, 2022, 12:37 PM I recently picked up an old Acer system with a Cyrix 6x86. System needs some work but it is still functional.

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