Carmacks implementations were pretty brutal to some vendors weren't they lol, Doom was indirectly responsible for Soundblaster becoming the defacto standard for sound cards as some of the other popular ones (I.E Roland) didn't work properly with the hacked MIDI implementations.
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For the oldies! What happened to Cyrix Processors
- Thread starter Richeh
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IMO it was a PII equivalent in the same way that a stock VW Beetle is a Chevy Camaro equivalent
IMO it was a PII equivalent in the same way that a stock VW Beetle is a Chevy Camaro equivalent
I'll go with the Beatle
IMO it was a PII equivalent in the same way that a stock VW Beetle is a Chevy Camaro equivalent
On integer performance the Cyrix chips beat the PII clock for clock. Floating point, not so much - the PII annihilates it - nearly twice as quick. Camaro reference isn't a mile off, the PII uses twice the power to still get it's ass whupped in ordinary driving.
Don
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I wish Cyrix was still around, just to give extra competition to Intel and AMD. We used to have quite a few Cyrix P200+ CPUS in our school, as school machines they were fine.
Not at that time, most people didn't even have one, the market was pretty split between Creative, Adlib, Gravis, Roland, etc.
Hmm. Not sure about that as it doesn't match up with my experiences.
c.1993 Roland LAPC-1/MT-32 and similar MIDI kit was £350 + interface cards etc if required, and then you'd need a PCM audio card for sound effects otherwise you only got music.
Adlib and SoundBlaster cards were close on price - around £70-100. Adlib quickly disappeared as they went out of business. Gravis Ultrasound had only just launched, cost a bit more and support was patchy (and glitchy).
Fast forward a couple of years and the Multimedia PCs that were flying out of the doors at work had SoundBlaster compatible soundcards. Market had opened up a lot with Windows 95. SoundBlaster/Adlib clone cards with OPL2/3 were ~£50ish from companies like Pine. Work were selling more SoundBlaster cards than those from Diamond, Turtle Beach etc. The Yamaha and Roland kit they stocked mostly sold to amateur musicians.
c.1993 Roland LAPC-1/MT-32 and similar MIDI kit was £350 + interface cards etc if required, and then you'd need a PCM audio card for sound effects otherwise you only got music.
Adlib and SoundBlaster cards were close on price - around £70-100. Adlib quickly disappeared as they went out of business. Gravis Ultrasound had only just launched, cost a bit more and support was patchy (and glitchy).
Fast forward a couple of years and the Multimedia PCs that were flying out of the doors at work had SoundBlaster compatible soundcards. Market had opened up a lot with Windows 95. SoundBlaster/Adlib clone cards with OPL2/3 were ~£50ish from companies like Pine. Work were selling more SoundBlaster cards than those from Diamond, Turtle Beach etc. The Yamaha and Roland kit they stocked mostly sold to amateur musicians.
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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
Yes the issue with the M200 series was very low floating point performance. I had one and thought it was a very snappy Windows performer. However it was nigh on useless with games and software that required good floating point performance.
Compared to my MMX166 and later MMX200 CPU's it was a 486!
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I'm not too familiar with who dominated the market in PC audio at the time in question, I will say that myself and everyone I knew who owned a gaming PC in the 90s (with 1 exception using adlib) used Soundblaster of some sort. I briefly used a piece of junk soundblaster knockoff but I got a SB (AWE 64?) after not too long.
The main problems with the Cyrix chips were the difficult bus speeds required to run them, which lead to issues with stability. The later 83MHz FSB chips were an utter nightmare (MII-333), as they required PCI cards and hard drives to run at 41.5MHz, which quite a lot of them wouldn't do. There were workarounds of course (like running 60MHz, 66MHz or 75MHz FSB), but with the L2 Cache being on the motherboard, this gave a massive hit to the already poor performance. Aswell as the weak FPU, the chips were hot and slow. The MII chips were struggling to hit 300MHz while Intel and AMD were pushing 400-450MHz.
That said, the 6x86 PR200 was a decent chip when it came out and held the performance crown for a couple of months in 1996. The problem was the AMD K6 and early Klameth Pentium IIs werent far from release. It was all unfortunately too little, too late. That said, they weren't the worst. That title goes to the IDT Winchips (remember those?), which were essentially 486-like CPUs running at up to 250MHz.
That said, the 6x86 PR200 was a decent chip when it came out and held the performance crown for a couple of months in 1996. The problem was the AMD K6 and early Klameth Pentium IIs werent far from release. It was all unfortunately too little, too late. That said, they weren't the worst. That title goes to the IDT Winchips (remember those?), which were essentially 486-like CPUs running at up to 250MHz.
The Athlon K7 had a really strong FPU actually, it was definitely a match for Pentium 3 if not better, it was the K6-2 and K6-3 that were weak in the FPU area compared to Pentium 2/3.
edit: there's a good database/timeline of processors here if anyone is interested:
http://redhill.net.au/c/c-1.html
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They are now, not in the mid 90s. Wasn't until the Pentium that the FPU was standard. All 386s and the 486SX didn't have an FPU, you had to buy an extra x87 compatible co-processor.
Then came the era of Quake and 3D accelerator cards and the FPU was critical.
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If you've got a spare half an hour, have a browse of Anandtech 's first posts and reviews on CPUs (and GPUs) by going to the CPU section and looking at the last pages of articles (50 something I think). They start in 1997 or so I think and it is pretty interesting! Some of the pictures still work!
Yeah, my 80286 had a copro socket, for a 80287 floating point processor. I purposely bought the 80486DX when I replaced it so as to get an FPU.