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For the oldies! What happened to Cyrix Processors

Richeh

Richeh

Richeh

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Just stumbled across this on YouTube and it caught my eye as my very first computer (pre-built from a high street retailer in 1998/9 I think) had a Cyrix M2 chip in it and even though I upgraded to AMD I remember wondering what happened.


Looks like if they had more financial backing then we could be looking at an alternative CPU landscape today. Whilst that could be said for most companies Cyrix actually seemed to have decent tech and were competing well with much lower money in the bank.
 
Saw that in my suggested videos about an hour ago - didn't bother watching it though - semi interested but I already kind of knew the story.
 
My first ever PC had a Cyrix 233 processor.

It was the worst CPU I have ever owned but also the most influential. It was the start of my enthusiasm today for which I'm grateful :)
 
I think I had a 233 or similar. I remember before the whole lot was chucked out, I delidded it and overclocked it with a hacksawed athlon cooler. It ran far better with the daft lid prised off.
 
jigger said:
I remember VIA had a deal on the table to buy them. That was a while back though.
Click to expand...

Via bought both Cyrix and Centaur Technologies in 1999 (And they are still the only other company with a license to manufacture x86 processors iirc).
 
Oh god yes the whole "Quake engine gate"
I remember some of my older friends owning Cyrix systems and the inability to play Quake causing much frustration.

I think at least from my viewpoint it very much became "To play games you need Intel" and thus we ended up in the mess we are today :P
 
I had a 586 and it was pretty rubbish from what I recall. I think my next was the Athon 800 which was very fast back in those days, there might have been something in between though. After my 486 dx100, I didn't go Intel until Core two Duo.
 
I seem to remember building a 133Mhz Cyrix based system. It was a nightmare, not because of the processor, but a soundblaster clone soundcard causing lockups.

For a lowish spec windows 3 computer it was OK.
 
The Cyrix 586 and Cyrix M1 were superior CPU's to Intel's CPU's at the time. The M1 had speculative execution and out-of-order execution giving a higher IPC then the Intel Pentium.

They were let down by poorer floating point performance, the game Quake effected sales as it relied heavy on floating point. However for software that did not require floating point they were very fast.
 
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