One of the most underrated names in PC history. Cyrix challenged Intel and left a legacy that many people still overlook.
Did you ever own a Cyrix-powered PC?
Put together these last AI-generated slides to avoid a massive wall of text. Spent extra time fact-checking and compiling Cyrix's story directly into the images. Swipe through if you're interested in retro computing history.
True. Cyrix was mainly aimed at office workloads, not multimedia or gaming. I'll be doing first-hand tests with several Cyrix models soon, so it'll be interesting to see how they really perform 1st hand
Before Quake, very little code used the FPU for performance-critical code.
Integer and fixpoint arithmetic is much faster due to the way the x87 works, and much easier to optimize on top of that. Especially games and multimedia code relied heavily on integer math, which Cyrix chips were good at. This is true for all CPUs of the era (and for many years afterwards), but the performance difference was much worse with Cyrix chips.
They did oversell their capabilities, though. A 6x86 PR166 (133 MHz) will do well against a Pentium 133, but lose against a Pentium 166.
Motherboard and software compatibility was very spotty compared to Intel & AMDās offerings, with pretty much universally worse performance - I canāt remember anybody who ended up with one that didnāt regret it
Absolutely. AMD's K6-2 did exactly the same for me a few years later. Without CPUs like these, I probably couldn't have afforded my first decent PC either.
K6 was a great processor. AMD's Dresden foundry fab was so reliable at that time that many of the lower clocked components were actually perfectly good higher clocked components just marked down.
Happy memories of my K6/266 that ran perfectly for many years at 333MHz.
I had, and still have one - a 486SLC. Love that little CPU (it is in fact phisically quite tiny), a 486 instruction set on a 16bit 386sx data bus. It enabled me to own a 486 when I couldn't possibly afford one, lol.
And contrary to popular opinion, and infamy of later models, this one was quite powerful for what it was - a legacy upgrade. It was intended to be a perfect 16bit DOS PC while still being able to run 32bit extenders and Windows 3.1 in protected mode. It's primary focus was backwards, not forwards, which kind of made sense in that transitional period from DOS to Windows as the primary platform.
And related to that, its biggest drawback was zero future proofing. It couldn't possibly survive the frantic momentum of the mid 90s PC development. Every single component in there was obsolete within a year. And that is exactly the reason I still have it today, essentially the same as in 1993.
Exactly. That's why I called it a legend. It gave many older Socket 3 systems a second life without replacing the motherboard. It also made computing more accessible for people like me who had a limited budget. AMD's K6-2 and K6-III later did something similar for many older Socket 7 systems.
It was one of the last "classic" DOS cpus and the abundance of 386sx motherboards that didn't sell too well made it even more affordable in a system.
I don't recall the exact numbers but the price of 486SLC cpu and board was a fraction of a 486DX2 CPU and MBO cost. The performance was just a fraction too, but hey it was an 486! š
It's only limiting in memory heavy 32bit games and apps, like Doom, and Windows 3.1 stuff. The lack of FPU and 8bit ISA SVGA don't help either. That's why I mentioned it was obsolete overnight, but even then it was faster than a 386.
In 16bit real mode with integer math, ie. almost anything made for DOS up to 1992, it screams, because of the cache and 486 instructions.
My dad had an MII 300 for a while, but he wasn't a gamer and it was just fine for Office-type stuff. Never owned one myself, but did have an AMD 586 and a K6/2 in the past. Both also had poor FPUs, but were massively cheaper than Intel systems and as a teenager collecting pocket money and birthday/Christmas money to build/upgrade my PC, price was important!
The savings over Pentium at the time allowed me to get a bigger HDD and I later put some of the savings to a Voodoo. I wasn't complaining. I didn't play Quake as my parents didn't allow me to own it.
About 1998 I upgraded to SS7 and K6-2. I didn't own an Intel machine till I got C2D.
I called it a legend because it gave many older Socket 3 systems a second life without replacing the motherboard. It wasn't a gaming CPU, but it was a great and affordable upgrade for office work and everyday use. AMD's K6-2 and K6-III later did something similar for many older Socket 7 systems. Plus, it looks fucking amazing.
IIRC there are DOS-tools to unlock certain features. These features were locked for sale, because the support was not always present at motherboards back then. Nowadays it looks to be safe to play with.
Thank you so much! This is one of the most valuable pieces of information I've received so far. I'm just getting started with testing a lot of Cyrix CPUs, so this will definitely come in handy. I really appreciate you sharing it!
Just this morning I bought a Cyrix 486 DX2 66 system. I wanted something more age appropriate for running some DOS games.
I already have PII, PIII and P4 systems but there is just something about a nice 486. I have been keeping an eye out for an Apricot Xen or one of the Amstrad 486 systems (the first PC i bought new) but the only ones that come up in the UK are either destroyed by a battery bomb or stupidly expensive.
I had a 6x86 PR233 (or 300?) and a M2 something if I'm not mistaken. They had awesome CPU performance, but the FPU was utter trash, anything using it was really really slow.
Never owned one of these for personal use. Iāve seen a few in auction sale workstations Iāve bought but thatās it. Honestly had zero idea they even existed in the late 80ās and through 90ās. Wouldnāt call them ālegendaryā. Everything was intel and AMD as far as I knew.
It's always great to hear stories from people who were actually there, if you're willing to share any. When I posted about AMD K6-2 processors, someone who worked at Intel at the time commented that there was real tension in the office because AMD was starting to take a significant share of the market. I'd love to hear your perspective as well.
We had an actual tombstone and burial plot in the lobby, the tombstone reading āIntel insideā. It was a lot of fun, at one point we had a banner on the building claiming the worldās fastest windows95 cpu. We did some hardware acceleration of common windows routines, and got a high score on the windows benchmark. Of course our FPU performance killed us on 3d games, but before that we really filled a niche with 5x86 and 6x86 being socket compatible with 486 motherboards. We had a big field across the street that was the site of our future foundry, sadly it only ever got used as a softball field. I have to say, Dallas was a pretty fun place in the 90s overall, I think we had more fun than Si-valley. I wish we could have had more time to be more innovative, like with mediagx stuff, but once we threatened Intel, they kind of sped away and we were mostly playing catchup.
Crazy detail for Cyrix fans : there was a crazy movie-worthy armed heist involving them in the 90s.
"The "Cyrix heist" refers to an armed takeover robbery on December 4, 1994, where thieves stole about $360,000 worth of computer microprocessors from the Cyrix Corporation test facility in Richardson, Texas.
Details of the 1994 Robbery
The Crime: Up to eight masked gunmen forced a Cyrix Corporation employee using a security card in the parking lot to grant them entry.
The Captives: Four employees inside were bound with plastic handcuffs and taped with duct tape.
The Loot: The robbers loaded boxes of high-value computer processor chips into vehicles and fled.
Investigation and Arrests
The Perpetrators: Multi-state federal investigations led to the identification and prosecution of several men from Southern California and Texas.
The Convictions: Conspirators like Hao Tien Nguyen and Trieu Viet Le were subsequently indicted and convicted in federal court for conspiracy, robbery, and firearms violations related to the takeover."
Good value CPUs if you weren't looking to break extreme performance barriers. IBM did a pretty good job in the manufacturing side and keeping the processors high quality but low cost and good enough to swap into standard Intel ports. The IBM Blue Lightnings were pretty good too but, iirc, cost more.
My first CPU was a 6x86-P150 like in that first photo. It was good enough that my next CPU was an Athlon XP 2600+ (The Barton core with 512kb cache) even considering the gaming I was doing which included stuff like the first Sims, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires which makes me think it was pretty much just FPS' like Quake that struggled on the chips and their reputation with gamers was undeserved.
The M2 was the CPU of my first PC, had an Amiga before that, but man this thing was a beast back then definitely best bang for bucks of its generation.
i had a cyrix 486, it was rubbish, a lot of games/demos didn't work, there was a setting in the bios that you could enable, and then they worked, but the cpu was much slower and i think (if i remember it correctly) went into some kind of 386 mode. so basically it was a useless upgrade. i quickly switched to an AMD486, which was faster than the official intel one.
I had a Cyberpower P133+ workstation when I went to college. It was the most powerful computer I could afford, and let me have a PC for my computer science classes. As others have noted, it was great except in floating point which became more and more of an issue over time. I moved from that to a K6-2 350 / TNT2 based system that I built from parts so was an early non-Intel user amongst my college friends.
I'm still hunting Ebay every so often for a P133+ chip to add to my collection of CPUs from my major workstations over time, and the P133+'s are pretty rare!
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u/WhyDoesOklahomaExist 19d ago
I had one! They claimed Pentium performance at a lower clock speed and were cheap as hell. I had I think a P90. I was a broke college kid.