A Brief History of Cyrix

I owe my entire career to the high school internship I had in the IT department at Cyrix in Richardson, circa 1996. It was awesome. Learned everything about building PCs for employees and Windows networking. So much free hardware walked out the door -- usually stuff that was slightly out of date, just stacks of it everywhere. Spent the next three summers there through college too. It was really exciting there at that time, Internet age just taking off. They had beer at 4PM on Fridays out back.

Everything went downhill with the series of acquisitions. Anyway, I'm grateful for my time there... I can trace where I am now directly back to the guy who first gave me a chance there.

It’s very interesting to learn about Cyrix and how innovative they happened to be. Back in the 90s most of us, at least in Europe, learned about Cyrix from either friends or shop clerks. And back then Cyrix had a terrible reputation, they were considered almost as illegal Intel CPU clones. AMD also had a terrible reputation until they released their Socket 7 AMD K6 CPUs and later on their Super Socket 7 K6-2, K6-3 CPU’s just before their amazing Athlon and Duron family. Cyrix never regained any reputation, and slowly their offerings ended up mixed with VIA or Centaur CPUs. Celeron and AMD CPU’s were already cheap enough so no one was buying Cyrix anymore to just save $20-$30 on a $1000 computer.

My first computer gig was me and a buddy upgrading his dad's office with Cyrix chips. 486 133MHZ I believe. We made $800 and to a college kid, that's all the money in the world. I bought a JAZ drive with my share.

I had a Cyrix 486 somewhere around 1992. Working with Windows NT and Visual C++ turned up subtle problems that could be worked around with some compiler switches.

I remember the excitement of scoring a surplus Cisco asa 5505 for a reasonable price and immediately cracking it open to see what was inside. To my amazement - the cpu had an AMD logo! I went down the rabbit hole of finding out what this mysterious chip was and turns out it was one of the cyrix/via/amd Geode SoCs mentioned by the writer.

I attended a charter school that got some kind of deal of cyrix based windows pcs. It was no end of headaches and compatibility issues. The school chronically mismanaged money and it seems like cyrix was being pushed in edu as low cost.

My first PC was a 486SLC. It ran games such as Strike Commander and Doom extremely poorly. But that was the only 486 we could afford.

A few months after the purchase we figured out we got scammed. That was not a 486. That was a 386 with 1KiB cache.

I never managed to forgive Cyrix after that.

My dad built our first windows 95 computer using a Cyrix chip. I can only assume it was a 6x86 from reading this article.

We had so many issues with it that we eventually replaced it with an intel-based HP. But in those days we were upgrading from 133MHz to 350MHz in the span of about a year and a half (ca. 1997).

By the time I built my first computer in college, the Athlon XP was breaching 1GHz, triple the clock speed in another 3 years time.

Fast times with “slow” computers. But it was sure fun to feel these major leaps in computing practically every year.

I think this is surprisingly incomplete, given that A-R-F normally goes deep.

I was actively involved in building, reviewing, benchmarking, and testing PCs at this time, from the late 80486 era through to the Pentium II era.

Cyrix came to prominence in the Pentium era with a chip that fit into Pentium sockets but was quicker than the Pentium. It wasn't a budget replacement: it was a competitive, better, faster offering. Intel wasn't used to that.

To quote my own blog post about them from 8Y ago:

For a while, I recommended 'em and used 'em myself. My own home PC was a Cyrix 6x86 P166+ for a year or two. Lovely machine -- a 133MHz processor that performed about 30-40% better than an Intel Pentium MMX at the same clock speed.

My then-employer, PC Pro magazine, recommended them too.

I only ever hit one problem: I had to turn down reviewing the latest version of Aldus PageMaker because it wouldn't run on a 6x86. I replaced it with a Baby-AT Slot A Gigabyte motherboard and a Pentium II 450. (Only the 100MHz front side bus Pentium IIs were worth bothering with IMHO. The 66MHz FSB PIIs could be outperformed by a cheaper SuperSocket 7 machine with a Cyrix chip.) It was very difficult to find a Baby-AT motherboard for a PII -- the market had switched to ATX by then -- but it allowed me to keep a case I particularly liked, and indeed, most of the components in that case, too.

The one single product that killed the Cyrix chips was id Software's Quake.

Quake used very cleverly optimised x86 code that interleaved FPU and integer instructions, as John Carmack had worked out that apart from instruction loading, which used the same registers, FPU and integer operations used different parts of the Pentium core and could effectively be overlapped. This nearly doubled the speed of FPU-intensive parts of the game's code.

The interleaving didn't work on Cyrix cores. It ran fine, but the operations did not overlap, so execution speed halved.

On every other benchmark and performance test we could devise, the 6x86 core was about 30-40% faster than the Intel Pentium core -- it was even faster than the 3rd generation Pentium MMX, as nothing much used the extra instructions, so really only the additional L1 cache helped. (The Pentium 1 had 16 kB of L1; the Pentium MMX had 32 kB.)

But Quake was extremely popular, and everyone used it in their performance tests -- and thus hammered the Cyrix chips, even though the Cyrix was faster in ordinary use, in business/work/Windows operation, indeed in every other game except Quake.

And ultimately that killed Cyrix off. Shame, because the company had made some real improvements to the x86-32 design. Improving instructions-per-clock is more important than improving the raw clock speed, which was Intel's focus right up until the demise of the Netburst Pentium 4 line.

AMD with the 64-bit Sledgehammer core (Athlon 64 & Opteron) did the same to the P4 as Cyrix's 6x86 did to the Pentium 1. Indeed I have a vague memory some former Cyrix processor designers were involved.

Intel Israel came back with the (Pentium Pro-based) Pentium M line, intended for notebooks, and that led to the Core series, with IPC speeds that ultimately beat even AMD's. Today, nobody can touch Intel's high-end x86 CPUs. AMD is looking increasingly doomed, at least in that space. Sadly, though, Intel has surrendered the low end and is killing the Atom line.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-of-...

The Atoms were always a bit gutless, but they were cheap, ran cool, and were frugal with power. In recent years they've enabled some interesting cheap low-end Windows 8 and Windows 10 tablets:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8760/hp-stream-7-review

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows10-Tablet-Display-11000mAh-B...

Given that there is Android for x86, and have already been Intel-powered Android phones, plus Windows 10 for phones today, this opened up the intriguing possibility of x86 Windows smartphones -- but then Intel slammed the door shut.

Cyrix still exists, but only as a brand for Via, with some very low-end x86 chips. Interestingly, these don't use Cyrix CPU cores -- they use a design taken from a different non-Intel x86 vendor, the IDT WinChip:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinChip

I installed a few WinChips as upgrades for low-speed Pentium PCs. The WinChip never was all that fast, but it was a very simple, stripped-down core, so it ran cool, was about as quick as a real Pentium core, but was cheaper and ran at higher clock speeds, so they were mainly sold as an aftermarket upgrade for tired old PCs. The Cyrix chips weren't a good fit for this, as they required different clock speeds, BIOS support, additional cooling and so on. IDT spotted a niche and exploited it, and oddly, that is the non-Intel x86 core that's survived at the low-end, and not the superior 6x86 one.

In the unlikely event that Via does some R&D work, it could potentially move into the space now vacated by the very low-power Atom chips. AMD is already strong in the low-end x86 desktop/notebook space with its Fusion processors which combine a 64-bit x86 core with an ATI-derived GPU, but they are too big, too hot-running and too power-hungry for smartphones or tablets.

I was going to post about something, but according to Wikipedia, the IBM 486SLC found in super slow PS/2 crap computers had nothing to do with the Cyrix 486SLC. Learn something new everyday.

My first pc (an ibm aptiva) had a cyrix 150 (i think) 686 clone cpu. As it was my first pc, I was pretty content with and had it for like ~5 years.