What Happened to Cyrix Processors? | Nostalgia Nerd
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 พ.ค. 2024
- Intel vs AMD? Forget it. The processor wars of the 90s are almost as legendary as Sega vs. Nintendo or Amiga vs. Atari. While Intel was improving the 386 and 486, competitors popped up like AMD and Cyrix, leaving Intel with a lot more competition on their hands than today, and various lawsuits followed along the way. These companies were dedicated to overtaking Intel in the processor race, and when Intel jumped to the Pentium, Cyrix and AMD weren't far behind with 5x86 and 6x86 processor iterations (AMD with their K6). This video will explore the whole Cyrix story, from their setup to their unfortunate demise. Along the way I'll ask the important question; Did Quake kill off Cyrix? Was it the undoing of an entire processor designer?.... It's a question which has basis in the Cyrix 686 processor's poor FPU performance and John Carmack's coding which leaned heavily on Intel FPU design. But it might not be the only reason why this silicon chip designer bit the bullet. This is an era where it wasn't just Intel vs AMD, or a simple price vs performance war. This was an era of Intel vs AMD vs Cyrix vs IDT, and for me, having lived through it, it's absolutely fascinating.
Sit back and witness glorious CPUs like the Cyrix 5x86, the 6x86, the MediaGX and the MII series. Along with early math co-processors that helped to make early x86 machines fly father than an IBM blue lightning chip set.
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I'm still amazed at how all companies were able to use the exact same socket. You could buy a motherboard, and then decide from which manufacturer to buy the CPU.
I love the idea of third parties producing faster CPUs for an older socket, as an upgrade path, so the customer wouldn't need to buy a whole new motherboard just to get a more modern CPU.
I actually am amazed by the reverse - That AMD was able to survive after they suddenly and unexpectedly needed their own chipset, socket and motherboard designs and for companies to get onboard with making boards that were NOT compatible with Intel. The Super Socket 7 was the transition point and luckily it allowed at least older Intel CPUs to still work, giving AMD a decent stopgap.
@@DracoDan2 I'm not that surprised that AMD could adapt. They had experience reverse-engineering chipsets, and if they didn't build their own alternative, they could have probably gotten one from VIA, or many others. Since they already had the socket 7 licence, it probably wasn't that hard to bump the front-side bus an extra 50%. And by "not-hard" I mean relatively. At the time AMD had their own fabs, so they had experts at every level to figure it out.
@@andychow5509 That's not exactly accurate though, they didn't create that bus (EV6), they licensed the technology from DEC who had created it for their Alpha CPU line (before they mistakenly sold out to Compaq). They also did create the first chipset, the AMD 750 before getting help from VIA and their KX/KT133 chipsets.
That's probably one of the reasons why now Intel keeps changing sockets as you change your clothes. Not that anyone would try to make an Intel Core clone these days, but it probably has a paranoia component as well, to be on the safe side. And it's also not that AMD is totally innocent, in spite of its long-lived sockets in recent years. Remember the socket 939 fiasco circa 2010, which left many AMD users fuming?
Back when PC Magazine was legit.
Back when most of those magazines were still legit and there've been actual journalists...
And those sweet demo discs. Those were the days.
And when there was only on PC Magazine.
Computer Shopper. Anyone remember that?
@@WarrenPostma the size of those mags were amazing.
Man, I can remember absolutely chomping at the bit in wait for my Cyrix Cx486DX2v66 chip to be delivered to me at work. I ordered it because I was tired of my boss beating me at Doom (on breaks) with his "faster" machine. I only had the SX25 while he was using the latest DX66. You wouldn't think it would make all that much difference, but it did back then. Those few extra mHz made all the world better. Then a few months later he got the Pentium...
,🤭😁
What happened then?
The war...it never ends
@@pixphi His boss lost, and due to being a sore loser, fired him for playing games at work.
This was my first PC in 1996:
* Cyrix 6x86 P166
* 16MB RAM
* 2GB HDD
* 16x CD-ROM drive
* Aztech audio card (sound blaster compatible)
* 4MB ATI 3D video card with MPEG hardware decoder
* 15" crt monitor with integrated speakers
* PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse
* Windows 95 OSR2 OEM
Oh man this takes me back... my first PC was a MITAC brand , 486 DX/2 66Mhz, 8mb of ram it came with OS/2 WARP (we switched to win 95 later) ...it ran doom well.
My next PC had the legendary Pentium 166mhz with MMX of course :) I got it to play MDK lol
My first PC in 1988. IBM PS/2 50Z
Intel 80286, 10Mhz
4MB RAM
30MB HDD
IBM 8512 Color monitor 14" VGA resolution
Integrated VGA Display adapter
IBM PC DOS Versions 3.30
IBM 101 Keyboard
3.5 1.44Mb floppy drive
NO Mouse was needed
@@josephtremblant2173 jesus that was before Charlemagne
C64 then a sx386-25. They were exciting days in IT. So bored now.
Somewhere i have a sticker that says “Cyrix Instead” shaped just like the intel inside sticker
There's a certain meta/irony in watching this nostalgia video *5 years* after it was released.
Same here: the YT algorithm put in my feed this week
Same here
While reading this comment 5 months after
OH man, I remember the days of the "Is the Sub-$1000 PC Upon Us?" articles. We were such summer children in those days.
Now budget is limitless it seems with graphics cards over that limit...
Brilliant as always. I remember the Cyrix chips being like a saviour to us “funds challenged” young pc upgrade enthusiasts in the late 90s.
You could make money building PCs back then, or doing virus removal. PCs were around $2000.00, you could built one for under a $1000.00, sell it for a decent amount and still save the customer money. Virus removal (remember internet is just becoming huge, AOL dialup) viruses everywhere. $50.00 and you would be back online, I had computers lined up for days.
As a former field service engineer, I fitted a few of them at small business IT departments and factories around the Thames Valley in the 90s. They were a saviour to many.
yeah, i remember buying a pr233+ cuz the pentium was outa my price range 😀 but it was detected as a 486 and wouldnt run a particular piece of software i had 😉
I was in my early 20s at the time, taking classes at the local community college, and to a man, every one of the computer nerds upon hearing I was going to buy (my first at the time) home PC was like "whatever you do, stay away from Cyrix." They'd apparently run into reliability issues with them and hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.
@@chuckmiller5763 Wow that's... interesting. Living in an ex commie land (Poland to be precise) you could get a decent PC for a small fraction of this money. And I'm not joking: around 1998/early 1999 my 15 year old self was able to build pretty solid PC with my own savings from allowance. In a country, mind it, where median salary at the time was something akin to 300$ a month, so it couldn't have costed me more than $200-$300. Obviously for a new PC you would have to add a price of most basic peripherals (I was reusing monitor, keyboard, mouse, and probably a sound card, and akso possibly a cd drive) but still... (if you wonder about specs -It was a celeron 333 which I run permanently overclocked at 415 Mhz with a RivaTNT based GPU and... I have no real idea how much RAM, as I was constantly upgrading. Damn it was 20 years ago and I still remember building the rig.
I'll never forget Cyrix. I remember being amazed at the engineering behind a chip that was compatible with Intel, without copying Intel in any way. This was the first time that I felt, as a consumer, the need to be part of something. Who could have forseen that would eventually lead to my tech addiction.
I worked for Cyrix. One of my favorite jobs. I was in IT rather than Engineering, but still, it felt like we were fighting the good fight and doing something important.
Yeah, getting kids so disappointed with Quake performance that they shot themselves. Or their parents. We need more space on this planet. Overpopulation, etc.
Give yourself a pat on the back.
I played quake on a Cyrix without shooting myself, I did as all the others i knew and bought a Voodoo-card which greatly increased the speed no matter what CPU you had...
You Sir, are a better man than me.What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
.I'm writing this from a hell populated by the legions of innocents who used the lords name in vain while contemplating the performance of their Cyrix chip in Doom.
Its hot down here. Yes, they use Cyrix down here too.
Again, I was in a support role, not engineering. I cannot tell you why Cyrix didn't focus on floating-point performance (the key to Quake). I can tell you that many of us played Quake (my handle comes from there) on Cyrix chips we got at cost, so I understand the frustration. The Good Fight was to keep competition going. Consumers lose when there is a monopoly. Monopoly means less innovation, higher prices and less choice. No matter whose chip you ran, Cyrix helped you get the best at the lowest price. Meanwhile, I prefer not to comment on other aspects in the above video, especially on Mr. Swent's arrival and what we felt that meant. But the history video could have ended at that point with only a short summation.
I'm joshing, mate. Yes its a great story (true story) but a lot of people were miffed when the system was such a disappointment, after all the hype.
The problem is, and its just as true today, the whole truth isn't told. That it was so weak in some important games should have been made clear.
That's all. Mom and Pop are not gonna buy Johnny another PC when he tells them the one they thought would make him so happy, didn't.
Just read the comments below. People were pissed off. I know it was cheaper but it doesn't matter. People were misled.
I would never ever have touched a Cyrix, Via or a Nehemiah. But by then everybody knew their reputation.
But they were exciting times.(if you didn't get burned).
Golden words are said at the end of the video. I have the same feelings for Celeron's. Yes - they were cheap and "stupid" processors, but it was thanks to them that many people even had a personal computer at home. The games went slowly, but people still played and rejoiced.
Thanks for the video, it was interesting!
I distinctly remember a celeron label on our first home pc.
So true, I bought a used computer from a high school friend that was a Celeron and it worked for everything I needed at the time. I upgraded from the family Pentium 133mhz to a personal Celeron 350mhz and it was a night and day difference for me.
The Celeron 300A with an Abit BH6 mobo is one one my sweetest memories
Back then we called Celerons the "Lentium" a word play between "Lento" (slow in Portuguese) and Pentium.
I remember my dad bringing one of the coprocessors home, handing it to me, and saying, "Put it in". I was like 9.
putting in processors in those ages was very tough. for a 9 y.o it must had been impossible.
Putting in shouldn't be difficult lol, configuring to work might be a challenge tho
“Starting quake”
Your dad: *literally cascade resonance scientist*
Working at a computer store in the mid 90s, we were standing around the store joking around, and my buddy suddenly points to the Cyrix in the display and busts out with the Crocodile Hunter voice; "Crikey it's a Cyrix Processor! A rare, nearly extinct species... Isn't she gorgeous! It's amazing how she moves so slowly, yet manages to survive in the wild!" I was in tears laughing at that one, so I'll never forget it
Totally understandable 🥲
U world you lived in doesn't exist anymore James.
That's better than the old "Crix Sux" on Kali
When i was 16 (in 1995) i started working in a small business that assembled PCs, server and installed network and isdn hardware and cables.
One day a customer showed up and ordered the cheapest PC we could build. Cyrix 486, Shuttle mainboard, some noname ram and granpa' finest cookies as harddrive.
I spent hours trying to find timings and voltages that all components could agree on.
It was the day i learned "jumper kung-fu".
23 years... damn...
Back in the day where there still was noname RAM with which you totally could eff up the whole rig's stability if you put more than just one into it...
In the same year I built myself a 486 PC, the mainboard of which had 45 jumpers.
I really liked working at Cyrix in Longmont, CO. I especially remember how awesome the break room was, free soda and a espresso machine. How I got a testing technician job with them is I told the truth about my understanding of Windows, from 1 to 10 (one being the least, 10 being the most). I told them that even the most knowledgeable engineer at Microsoft probably couldn't be more then a 9 and there is so much in regards to the development side that I don't know even exists, so I said a 6. They said every other person they interviewed just blurted out a 10, with no explanation as to why they think they know it inside and out. It had to be the best interview I have ever had. Anyway I did well there and really miss the talking to the cool engineers, but left to help Mike Booth make a video game, Nox in Fort Collins (that is another story).
I find it funny that Longmont has a tech background, my stepdad worked at IBM in Longmont.
Cool town now too, now that I'm older. Lots of good microbrews in the city like Left Hand. I kinda miss that town.
Longmont is famous for its Potion Castle
I really liked working at Cyrix in Longmont, CO. I especially remember how awesome the break room was, free soda and a espresso machine. How I got a testing technician job with them is I told the truth about my understanding of Windows, from 1 to 10 (one being the least, 10 being the most). I told them that even the most knowledgeable engineer at Microsoft probably couldn't be more then a 9 and there is so much in regards to the development side that I don't know even exists, so I said a 6. They said every other person they interviewed just blurted out a 10, with no explanation as to why they think they know it inside and out. It had to be the best interview I have ever had. Anyway I did well there and really miss the talking to the cool engineers, but left to help Mike Booth make a video game, Nox in Fort Collins (that is another story).
Back in the days when overclocking could mean a 50% increase in power!
I remember getting a Cyrix P200 (pr200?) and clocking that up to 333. Then upgrading to an AMD on that same motherboard and going to 400mhz!
I think my 3570k with ~30% increase (3.4 -> 4.4) still holds up pretty well.
I can remember getting an occasional AMD K5-75 to clock at K5-PR166 levels (but only some of the VERY early production, most were lucky to hit K5-100 levels).
Its also the day when you could now encode mp3s faster than they would play. in the 120MHz age it took longer than the song time to encode.
I literally sent cash money in the mail to cyrix to upgrade my 386 20mhz to 486 33mhz for $120.66. And they found it and shipped it to me after a phone call of course. lol. Love the 90's!
indeed amazing times not processor related but i recall spending hours on the phone with customer support to get a game up(don't recall the title) and running on my weak system. im pretty sure the guy know it wouldn't run on my system from the start but he spent at least 3 hours on the phone trying to walk through every fix he could think of to make it work! something like that would not happen today.
kizonthekeys customer service jobs almost always have a metric that measures productivity. His was probably phone time. He actually got an entire days work done by talking to one person: you!
I miss the old customer service of the 90's: my best experience was with DR Solomon (anti virus)
During my studies, I came across a bug in DR Solomon on a P90 (HP) - when DR Solomon and HP Utilities ran at the same time (on Windows 3.11), DR Solomon would crash. So, I phoned our local customer service number (in Denmark) around 15:00-16:00 and was asked when, I normally leave in the morning. I replied about 7:00. "We'll send someone with an upgrade before that". At around 6:45-7:00 there was a knock on the door. Outside, there was a guy with a new set of disks (3.5") and a BIG apology for my inconvenience. Coming home from school that day, I upgraded - and it worked.
Henrik B Sørensen fantastic!
@@hagalazmultiverze3411 I made a lot of money removing viruses with Dr Solomon, remember that 3.5 floppy drive boot disk Solomon had so you could scan the HDD and remove the virus.?
First PC I built completely from scratch had a Cyrix CPU as it's all I could afford at the time and had the biggest bang for the buck...Brings a nostalgic tear to the eye...Cue digital lighter...
Yeah, they weren't much, but building them yourself had a certain level of pride. It took me six months to build my own. I didn't have much money, so I would buy a part or two at a time each month until one was built. :) Good times. There's something I miss about those slower, more limited systems and graphics back then.
Please adjust your LEd numbering on the case to 200 whenthe computer ran to 133, to everybody said "WOOW"
Emperor Of The Known Universe same here mate!
Same same. It was a crap PC, but man I was I ever proud of that thing. Just the fact I could put something like that together with my own hands and actually have it boot up and run opened up a whole new world.
i *still* bought the parts piece by piece over 6 months just last year >.>
I remembered that time, I never buy a Cyrix chip but the computer hardware was exciting. New hardware came out every week like 3DFX, Sound cards. Great times ;)
The magazines you had to get to buy parts for your computer. Good times..
Cyrix will always hold a fond place in my heart. Back in the 90s, when I was still in high school, I built my first PC (cost much less than buying one) with a Cyrix processor. Sadly, by the time I needed to build its replacement, they weren't around anymore.
The 90s seems like this weird dream. It's hard to believe I was part of it.
Lord Sidius the 80s didn’t gave us Space Jam,
The thing I'm disappointed in myself for is not getting into more programming in the 90's as a teenager. I was too much into building a PC and browsing the net.
Gabriele Riva, the 80s gave your the Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi. Michael Jackson Thriller and Bad, Tears for Fears, and many great pop songs (90s had pop but it got burried by grunge rock before that got buried by late 90s hip-hop) the Commodore 64, the IBM Compatible PC, and the NES.
That’ll be the shrooms and heroin
Don't forget Saved by the Bell and Power Rangers!
i remember back in the day buying a 486dx2 and getting it home and with sweaty hands (it cost a fortune) fitted it in my pc only to find it didnt boot :( , i had put it in the wrong way around and i thought i had killed it ! .... but turned it around and it worked . my mrs found out how much i spent on it and went mental , we broke up a year later as she said i spent to much time and money on my pc . i found out later she had been having an affair with the it guy at her work . ironic mutch
ironic indeed, and a good thing for you since computers worth both the money and the time you invested in and never cheats on you...
good riddance. lesson for life. go your own way, do your own thing.
I remember having to buy a new PC ring around top of the line intel 486 Dx2-66 in 1993 just to be able to play doom. It did cost a fortune. Fortunately as a college student, I was working and not paying rent thank's to the generosity of my parent's(basement was mine). Then I made a mistake of going to a sound blaster expo show and another expense was needed, an overpriced creative wave blaster board which required 2 pci slots to operate, a SB 16 bit stereo & a SB wave blaster daughter board, a few months later a new marvel was released and I bought it too, a creative sound blaster awe 32 which accepted regular simm memory and only required 1 PCI slot to operate, which brought countless hours of joy playing PC games thru unique wave synthesis(MIDI synthesizer). Most people used to listen thru a mono speaker from a PC and I had an orchestra while playing my fav games. Those were the days when having a PC gaming ring required to have a Mobo with 5 PCI slots available. 3 for video(1x 2d video card + 2x 3dfx voodoo cards(SLI mode) and 2 for audio (SB 16 bit + SB wave blaster).
It sounds like you were already having an expensive affair with the PC
Sorry to hear that. Seems like you ex had an inclination for technology anyway. Currently, my wife is extremely happy that I completely moved away from PC gaming/PC Server projects at home to PS4 pro(for gaming) and to ARM64 SBC boards like the cheap raspberry Rpi4's 8Gb and Odroid boards as N2/N2Plus and C4, which keep me occupied during my spare time at home and specially during the long winters in East Canada. The expense is much less now once you're are setup with mandatory accessories which are way cheaper than PC ones.
In an alternate universe, it's AMD vs Cyrix... in another, it's Intel vs Cyrix... in this, it's AMD vs Intel
In another All of Em are competing In another There is a Monopoly of Processors That can be the one of the 3
Why not Intel vs AMD vs Cyrix?
There can be only one.. but there's always 2
And GPU competition back then were Voodoo vs NVIDIA vs Radeon vs Matrox
@@aaadj2744 ...vs Tseng vs ELSA vs Cirrus Logic vs Hercules vs 3DLabs vs Trident vs Diamond vs V7 vs Orchid...
It just occurred to me how powerful it would be to download every video on your channel, rip them to VHS tapes, and time travel with them back to 1990 Silicon Valley. Could you even imagine?
Just bring a Ryzen 9 7950x and a x670 MB, a i9 12900k and z690 mb, a WD Gen 4 4tb m.2 a RX6900XT a rtx4090. Drop them off at their respective manufacturers and go back to present times to see how much you disrupted the progression of tech. Oh and don't forget a Displayport to vga adaptor... Lol
@@scottcol23 lmao less accessible on my budget, but that would certainly be an effective strategy.
@@scottcol23 Wont come back. Have to stay to buy Amazon, Apple around the early 2000s, Bitcoin in the late 2000s, short the banks in 2008 and GME in the 2020s.... then I can tell Bro Musk : Feck orf, imma paying 45b for Twitter and imma blocking your account.
@@keithw4920 Those are worthy pit stops to make lol I was mining bitcoin in 2012 when the price of one coin was about $18. at the time I had 3 Radeon HD 5770's and was getting one BTC every 3 days... Man do I wish I had just known to keep those coins...
@@scottcol23 I had my card out in 2009 wanting to buy some of this new fangled blockshit. Didnt go thru because I couldnt understand the white paper much. Might have sold em at 10 bucks or so though, it would still have been a >10000% profit.
Only time I ever bought a Cyrix chip was in 2000 when Intel introduced its "ID number" anti-piracy measure for the Pentium III. I thought I was being such a consumer privacy activist by boycotting Intel.
Oh how naive we were back then.
I still remember No TCPA, was quite a thing in the early 2000s.
The first computer that I ever owned personally (i.e. not shared with family members) had a Cyrix 133 CPU. Embarrassingly, I always thought it was pronounced "Sear-ix" until I was corrected one day. That day is today.
I still pronounce it that way.
It is Sear-ex.
Mine too. Actually it was a 120, but I bumped the FSB up from 60 to 66 for that extra little bit of oomph ;)
Just depends. The voice also pronounces "them" as "vem". But, yeah, I pronounced it as "Si' riks", too.
Given he mispronounced Jalapeno, I wouldn't really use this as a guide on how to pronounce the company's name. Especially one that was based in Texas.
I used Cyrix MII in my first ever computer. Eventually fried it through overclocking, while playing Settlers III. Good old days 😁
shame Cyrix is gone they gave you options and choice for computers that now they are gone you no longer have and that's a tragedy😭
Now in 2019 with several security flaws around branch prediction, makes you wonder if Cyrix had the right idea all along to turn it off
But it makes benchmarks higher, and that's the end all-be all to consumers. Consumers don't always know what they need, and if the marketeers aren't principled enough to inform the consumer, the market is essentially SOL.
without branch prediction, you end up in the performance area of the first intel atom.
@SteelRodent That is not true at all, from what I could tell from the guidance given to developers at the time. All you need is the ability to have some control over instruction execution, which is trivial with JS on the web, and you can sometimes skip software access checks (like JS array index checks) and try and scrape information you shouldn't have from the process memory (like information from other sites), so browsers had to much more carefully keep information out of the site's process.
@@SimonBuchanNz Trivial? TRIVIAL? LMFAO!
@@spudhead169 I believe you misread me: "have some control over instruction execution" is the trivial thing, and having that and to be in the same process as some secret data is enough for an attack to be plausible.
The problem with assuming that because the attack itself may be very difficult that you don't need to worry about it, is that only one person needs to figure something out and share it for everyone to have access to everyone's secrets, and because the vector is so widespread it was a huge deal.
Just some interesting info from manufacturers in Taiwan regarding Cyrix MediaGX/Geode...
They are extremely popular for making video slot machines, popular enough that some small manufacturers are buying recycled circuit boards that contains the version of the Geode/GX chip they need, desolder and test each chip before reusing them.
And they have tested offerings from VIA, when mentioning VIA, the normally polite and timid engineer started to curse out loud about how crazy buggy VIA's CPU are...
Also let's admit it together, many Chinese and Taiwanese railroad locomotives do use the MediaGX as the processor on the control center :3
Why _that_ chip in particular, I wonder?
NeuronalAxon Because it was cheap to be built in in many low budget embedded motherboards for these kind of applications :3
that's insane. Don't they just use microcontrollers for those things? Certainly don't need an x86 to run something like that. Even ARM or MIPS would work and as cheap as Geode if not cheaper. This is the reason you don't bet on products with low life expectancies, the product disappears.
MrTweetyhack notice the video part. You can't really expect that much 2D graphics performance from MCU, and it could do a little bit of 3D effect from time to time as well.
I think mediaGX is just barely enough to do it and cheap enough for good profit.
Great video. So much nostalgia in this.. shopping the pc part price list and upgrading my 486DX.. man...how time flys
truth. i remember the PC Magazine covers that were like 200MHZ?! like we had just discovered a cure for cancer.. hehe
same here. i miss drooling over pcmag and tigerdirect magazines late into the night. i miss the CompUSA flyers that would come every weekend in the newspaper. i miss the demo disks that used to come with PC gaming magazines...just the thrill of playing a few minutes of a new game ran by YOUR computer was better than crack.
Talk about nostalgia. I recently went through old stuff and found a Feb 1997 PC Magazine, and a Maxell DC-6250 1/4" "data cartridge" (=backup tape), among many other things. Fun memories. I happened to open the magazine to an article that starts out "I finally decided to get a new modem....."
I only had a 486sx due to being a kid however I deliberately chose the SX over an AMD as I couldn't bare to have a PC that didn't have an Intel processor. Kids who had AMD's got laughed at in my school, if you had a Cyrix you were pond life, nobody would even speak to you.
There's a certain feeling (now lost) in those days when news in computers was exciting and everyone was scouring the ultra thick Computer Shopper magazine for any advantages. I installed a few Cyrix processors and was waiting for their greatness, but quietly they just vanished.
Sounds magical
I probably wasn't even born then or very young so idek what ur talking abt but it sounds enchanting, as nostalgia usually is
I had a while where I felt like I lost that magic as well, but it has changed. It can now be found in the poorly named "maker" hobby. IoT, Automated model aircraft, wearable tech, Machine Learning. This excitement is a wave, and you gotta keep riding it otherwise it will move on without you. Before computers it was Radio tech, and engines, it just keeps moving.
I started out on a 386. That computer's motherboard and CPU were upgraded to a Cyrix 486dx2 80MHz. We stayed on that CPU until the Pentium II, as the Cyrix would pretty much crush any Pentium that it came across (y'know, at LAN parties :) ). Part of that was memory. We had a boatload of memory for the time since the board could use 30pin and 72pin memory. We had 12MB if I recall correctly. X-Com Apocalypse and Descent 2 ran great on the machine! :)
A lot of effort went into that video. Well done!
A lot of video went into that effort more like. One can only polish a turd so much. We use PCs to play games. The Cyrix couldn't. Therefore it was, is - and always will be, shit.
Game over.
Yes it is an entertaining video, but it it rambles on a bit at times and the viewer can be still digesting the information when the next hopper load of facts and figures is poured into their brain.
My video = Cyrix promised a 747 but delivered a paper plane. 2 pictures, A 747 and a child holding a basic paper dart. Big round of applause. I bow, smiling graciously and a lot of resources burned while watching his video are saved. All very dull but preventing Global warming is dull.
Who's this "we", Kemosabe? Got a mouse in your pocket?
Always. And a joystick, Mister Ed..
Many thanks to author.
Awesome Video, but such a sad story. Intel was price gouging their Pentiums (a 166 in 1995-6 could cost you $500) and getting away with it before the 6x86 came along and forced them to drop prices fast. For a while Cyrix was the little company that could. Had Cyrix made their first 6x86's run cool with a fast floating point unit for Quake and 3D gaming they might have made fast fans with gamers instead of getting a bad reputation. But I remember a lot of businesses and schools here in Texas used computers with later lower voltage Cyrix MX and MII CPU's. For office, school work and Non-3D gaming Cyrix CPU's were a good bargain and kept a lot of local "Mom & Pop" OEM computer stores in business. I don't think Quake alone killed Cyrix. It was the combined attack from Intel's Celeron and AMD's K6 family (which were faster and better CPU's for Socket 7) that really did Cyrix in. They couldn't keep up with Intel's and AMD's rapid pace of development and then got gutted. Keep up the awesome work on your videos!
The Celeron was literally a Pentium with a castrated cache, created by Intel marketing not engineering. It still is.
I agree the early Celerons and some later ones were junk chips. But the Celeron 300a (not 300) got a great reputation in the gamer community then for being easy to overclock to 400-450 mhz with a good heatsink. And that you could easily upgrade to a "real" Pentium II when you got the cash or when prices dropped was a nice bonus.
Holy smokes. You unlocked a long forgotten section of my memory of those teenage days. While I didn't own a Cyrix processor myself, I think some friends did.
I had one Cyrix processor. Then the market went AMD.
You're lucky. Cyrix processors were utterly horrible and broke down pretty often.
I almost bought one, but then my friends talked me out of it.
@@AlexeiVoronin They weren't that bad *IF* they went into a motherboard with proper support for them *AND* if they were configured correctly.
They had weird supply voltages though, and a LOT of folks over-volted them.
I watch this video once every 3-4 months. Incredible narration, perfect music... Just amazing. I wish you created more of these videos.
Lmfao what.
1:17 The 5x86 lacked branch prediction, meaning that it was immune to Spectre. LOOKS LIKE THEY WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG.
lol! Nice catch.
+SteelSkin667:
I prefer to have branch prediction in my CPU.
If you are doing something important with your PC, then you should have the option to disable that CPU feature.
True but it utterly brutalizes performance
iluminati
@ they knew it long before it happen, as always...what?
I had a magnet on my fridge that said something like "Cyrix: Anything else is half fast."
I played WoW at 10 - 14 fps when I was younger on my eMachine and had no problem with it. I was just happy to be playing WoW lol!
Did you play 18 h a day and you poop in a can?
@@louistournas120 Come on now, that was uncalled for.
Chill out, dickwad.
And ate hot pockets
@@nonegone7170 What you mean? Many of us did. Some of us still do.
@@nonegone7170 simp
Man... I used to build PCs back in college in the early-mid 90s and loved the Cyrix processors for business-type systems. They were cheap and definitely capable for your typical student/business user (who wasn't playing Quake)
yeah it's a shame they no longer exist they gave us options and choices for our computers they will be missed
I sold computers around the time they had their P200 and P233 models. It was really easy to sell to customers. "It's just as fast but cheaper"... that worked always...
And I was one of many who learned the hard way that you get what you pay for.
@Luca Rossi Had a new system built in 1998. Went with a Cyrix M2 because it was cheaper and it burned up within 45 days.
Actually the AMD's were the fastest back then at 200
@@anonymousinc6330 this could have been avoided by using a good cooler on that microprocessor, which turns out to become pretty hot when operating. However, i know some people who collect old processors. How about designing a motherboard which can hold say about 16 processors in 1 time. Thats a good idea, but the cooling still is neccasary on the processors. They get hot when operationg. The cooling prevents the burn up
@@WimHamhuis This one had good cooling. It was just a POS from the word go. Cyrix has gone the way of the dodo for a reason.
Just sent this video to my dad. He was on the Cyrix chip design team from 1992(ish) all the way through the VIA acquisition. I remember having a viewing party for The Eraser when it came out on video.
I'd love to hear his stories and comments.
I was almost a Cyrix owner, almost. A long time ago, so long that most of it is blurry, I decided to give up my TI 994a and my Commodore 64 and get on the PC bandwagon. I initially was going to purchase an Amiga but my friends had all moved on to 286 machines a year or so ahead of me and I was stuck in the past. It was time to catch up. Instead of just going down to the computer store and buying something in a box, I decided to order a computer built more to my specs. I got a copy of Computer Shopper and started comparing ads for computer builders. I settled on a company out of Texas that offered all kinds of options. I called them and had a lengthy conversation about what I was going to do with the computer, it was a good talk that ended with a list of components that would be my first PC. On that list was a Cyrix 386, the heart of my computer. A couple days later the guy calls me back and asks if I'd be willing to go a couple hundred dollars more for some upgrades? We talked it over and I agreed to the new parts list and on that list was an AMD 368 that was faster than the Cyrix, I also received a free monitor and an extra mouse as it was hard to find those items in black. My black computer got comments from almost everyone and after a year or so of owning it I sold it for more than I paid. Since then I've owned nothing but Compaq and HP computers all with AMD processors and a lot of them were and are black. Those early computer days were amazing, so many different components, so much change. I really enjoyed this video. I had always wondered what had happened to Cyrix, the processor I'd almost owned.
I was so hammered in the '90's that i'd forgotten all about Cyrix, even though I owned 2 of them.
Shit a brick.....are you saying the '90s were real? I thought it was a dream. Can I F9 and go back for another crack at the totty I missed?
I know the feeling. I've two ex-wives I don't remember meeting.
Hello, I really liked the video many thanks for doing it. However I find some minor imprecise information on Cyrix architecture.
Around 17:00 you said that “whilst developing quake John Carmak realized that fpu and integer operation used different part of Pentium core and could be effectively overlapped. This nearly double the speed of fpu intensive game code, however on Cyrix processor the operation didn’t overlap”. This statement was a bit confusing for me so I did some research on the topic. Cyrix is capable of overlapping integer and floating point operation together, in fact was one of the selling point of the advantages of a Cyrix architecture over the Pentium. It is written on the 6x86 manual (datasheets.chipdb.org/Cyrix/M1/6x86/M1-1.PDF). The Pentium core in fact is not able to do that unless the floating point operation is a division. Division is and expensive operation and takes up to 39 cycles on a Pentium to be completed, but Michal Abrash ( this is the engineer responsible for Penitum optimisation in ID software, not Carmack) find out that in the specific case of the division you could pipe up 39 single cycle integer instruction while and division is in executing making it virtually a 1 cycle operation during projection phase. It uses also some extra care to optimise to some degree dot product and matrix multiplication. All of this is very well documented and you can find all the tricks used in Abrash’s book , chapter Floating-Point for Real-Time 3-D (www.drdobbs.com/parallel/graphics-programming-black-book/184404919 ).
This optimisation you mentioned in the video was adding a feature that the Pentium lacked and the Cyrix had naturally by not using any tricks. What killed the Cyrix in floating point execution was the lack of pipelining for floating point operation. This massively reduce the throughput especially when you have a long sequence of floating point operation and you have no integer to overlap, like for example in a matrix multiplication. Without a pipelining the cpu have to wait the whole operation to be completed before issuing another, so for example if a multiplication takes 3 cycle you get a multiplication every 3 cycle. With pipelining the cpu can issue another instruction as soon as the current one left the current stage, so in the cpu have still to wait 3 cycle for the first operation to be completed, but all the susequent ones will be completed whitin a cycle of distance. On top of that Cyrix multiplication and Addition takes double cycles than pentium to complete ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87).
Concluding the Pentium-specific optimisation helped quake go an extra mile, but ultimately the Pentium had a very high floating point throughput even without specific optimisation compared to Cyrix.
Sorry I wrote a long comment but I think it's important to clarify since quake vs Cyrix is kinda the whole point of the video.
This comment needs to be pinned. I also remember the problem being not just Quake, but most games! Thanks for the info!
Very good comment. Thanks!
Most researched comment EVER! Awesome info, thank you.
For some reason, I understood approximately none of what you said but really enjoyed reading it, fair play on the research and knowledge sharing side of things though, top stuff.
You've gone above and beyond.
@Andy Wheale Agreed.
I remember trying to play Sonic the Hedgehog on Windows 98SE. It wouldn't work on Cyrix processors, since it did a CPU check on boot of the game to check the strength of the processor. I ended up downloading an unofficial Cyrix driver that fooled the game into thinking it was an Intel chip. Worked great, but a pain for some games.
I had the same problem with the original release of Final Fantasy VII, it would run to a certain point in the game and crash unless you had the Cyrix Driver, I personally owned the MX200 PR at 160mHz and a Trident64 2d card and Voodoo2 8meg adapter for graphics. LOL, what difference a decade does for our current gaming hardware.
I remember the Pentium CPU check in games now that you bring it up. I never heard about the driver trick though. What the Cyrix chip could run it did run fast. Still, I always felt like I only had a souped up 486 when I was using it.
+Paul Frederick The problem appeared to be the worst in Windows 95, at least pre-OSR2! (and probably earlier as well) Because Windows 95 reportedly, will report 486 or the like!
+RJARRRPCGP when I used that chip I was running Windows 95 too. Then I got a genuine Pentium 200 MMX. I also started running Linux too.
It was almost certainly something of this ilk. Many games were unwisely coded to identify whether or not it was running on a Pentium, and would just outright refuse to run if it didn't detect. Obviously this was intended to prevent the game from running really badly on underspecced 486s, but often locked out other perfectly valid non-Intel CPUs
I seem to recall G-Police requiring an updated launcher to identify the Cyrix correctly, at which point it would start the game and run reasonably well.
I remember building a duel celeron rig and installed NT just to play doom omg the good old days
If I recall correctly (but perhaps I had another copro), the Cyrix 387 was totally different than intel's as it was a stack based FPU instead of the Intel register one ... pushing and poping FP onto the CPU. I think I ended up hand coding Mandelbrot calculations on that CPU.
I used to so look forward to getting the "Computer Shopper" multi hundred paged magazine and spooging over all the new tech where I learned about cyrix and stuff. Computer Shopper out shined all the other mags even with it's phone book paper pages.
That was some nerd porn back in the day. It's what ultimately led me to build my own system, as I'm sure many here :)
I agree, I had stacks of "Computer Shopper" magazines and would sift through EVERY page, just like some kid who's face would be pressed against the glass outside a candy store.
+@Umh Chud - "Alice and Bill" tech section
Ahhh. Those were the days. 56k modem ads. "Budget" systems for under $2,000. $4000.00 laptops. Articles claiming Dell and Gateway would never sell a sub-$1000 desktop. CRT monitor ads. 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier OEMs. Yes, those were the days.
Also....
"Hacking" AT modem commands for faster speed.
Usenet
BBS
"Shotgunning" modems
Making fun of people who used AOL
Overclocking that had real world uses, not just bragging rights.
You could have a desktop case in any color as long as it was beige.
+@@n3Cr0ManCeD - Trident video cards, ISA, 512K, to handle Silent Service II.
I use to sell Cyrix processors when I built an sold low-cost PCs. Good times during the K5 and Cyrix days.
How stupid does Cyrix think we are?! Everyone knows that the human eye can't see past 13 FPS!
Get better glasses dood
24
I thought it was like 20-30 fps
@@tomfly3155 nah i can see a difference between 30/60/120 fps
@@linkthehero1234 ya, me too. But scientists bastards say it's more than 30, but less than like 150
Worked at a electronics store at that time. We had several Cyrix machines for sale. A rep from them came one day and was answering questions, and handed out some goodies
I got a Cyrix CPU without the black ceramic.. imbedded in clear Lexan. Had that for years... Was so cool.
Miss those days.. so much was going on... Every day seemed exciting.
Thanks for the history of Cyrix. Back in the 70's, Jerry Rogers hired me to work in the microprocessor design group at Texas Instruments in Houston, and Kevin McDonough was my supervisor. We worked on the TMS9900 and TMS320 families of chips. In the early 80's I and co-workers would spend our lunch times discussing how one could start a company to compete with Intel. We had agreed that math co-processors would be the way to go. Systems were often being shipped with empty math co-processor sockets which a new company could sell into. With a successful track record in co-processors, one could move up to main processors.
The discussion of Quake was interesting as I was reading about its' technique for implementing fast floating point reciprical square root.
Like others I drove by the Cyrix building on US 75 in Richardson for years.
I grew up there and a parent still lives very close by. The building is still there folks! Just not the Cyrix sign...*sob*
I was an Amiga boy until late 1995 when I built my first gaming PC. It was a Cyrix 6x86 P133+ based rig with a 1m S3 Virge gpu. A few months later I added a Voodoo 3Dfx. Those were the days. The Cyrix was great in many ways, often beating Intels. In some games though, it was lacking severly. And yes, I'm looking at you, Quake. Still, Quake ran great under Glide and looked amazing.
The upgrade to 450mhz Celeron was my next step. And a big one it was. Still, I never forget my first PC CPU, the Cyrix 6x86 P133+.
the amd k5 was superior you fool lol
This was a pretty cool time to be gaming. The thing with Quake was that it was hand tuned for the Pentium cpu. Most of that tuning was broken with the 3rd party cpus, and some of it even with the PII, but the PII was fast enough to run it without the optimizations. I have read Michael Abrash's Black book on programming, as well as other books back in the day on Pentium architecture optimization.
Good times! There are people doing some of that now, but with GPU's rather than CPU's. Still good times :)
(well not for other things...stupid corona virus)
As a former cyrix employee i can say it was a fun place to work
Cyrix. That's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
Thank Christ.
I had a Cyrix CPU as a child, I loved it!!!
@@ChristopherSibert the one and only I ever had was very short-lived. Needless to say, I was not impressed.
I haven't gone by that name since, oh before you were born.
ever heard of Semiconductor ?
Intel introduced "Branch Prediction", and now that's a security risk due to Spectre bugs! So we should have stayed with our dear Cyrix CPUs ;-)
But now we have ryzen
Yeah, I prefer ryzen.
What a great video - thank you!
I remember reading all sorts of magazines in the 90s and early 2000s about cyrix and i also remember the idt winchip which i remember used to have its main advertising pitch about having the most transistors on a cpu (as opposed to touting performance awards)
Wow! Talk about a walk on memory lane! Those were some exciting times in tech back in those days. I was working as a purchasing agent for Computerland back in the 80's and early 90's. It was probably some of the most fun I had ever had in the PC market. Great video!
Gotta love that buttery smooth 13fps gameplay.
i guess that's how it looks like way back then.
SomeFriendlessBastard 13 FPS makes 30fps look great.
Human eye can’t see more than 1 frame per second.
I think that was just their marketing crap, no-one thought 13fps was smooth back then. I was gaming in that era fanatically and I always wanted 20fps.
@@infiltr80r Exactly. 13fps was never good
Need more clips from "Secret life of machines", maybe commentary eps? I've always loved that show
Secret life of machines. Loved that theme song~! Also the show was very good too.
yeah why was that clip even in there? What did that show have to do with Cyrix?
Really enjoyed this video! I've still got a couple of IBM 6x86 P-120s on a shelf. Loved the bit of trivia, at the end, too. Thanks for the video. :)
Amazing video! I always wondered what happened to Cyrix because I had a PC while at school with one inside it. Thank you for making this video, brings back very happy memories of secondary school
PR ratings were a nightmare because so many times I saw people think it was the actual MHz and configure their motherboards accordingly and then suffer instability of the overclocked system.
With the right voltage and cooling I got them above the PR ratings. They were cheap enough to risk it.
Didn't either Intel or AMD do something similar to mislead folks by using model numbers that mimicked clock speed? I remember buying something 20 years ago and the guy said "It might have 266 on it, but that's not the speed"
Rob Fraser AMD
I remember a computer hardware engineer once told me that Cyrix had some really good CPU's but said that it was very difficult to get technical information from Cyrix.
What a great account of the Cyrix history. I worked there from 1992 to 1999 and what a ride that was!
Cyrix, brings me back to my junior high school computer lab in the late 90s. I hope all is well for that girl I had a secret crush on.
Dude!!! I love this, CyrixInstead has to be the most epic CPUID ever! Thanks so much for making this, I am a huge AnythingButIntel fan. Had me a couple of these and some AMDs back in the day.
My modem is running an AMD Geode, I didn't know it was a Cyrix.
Such a great walk down memory lane. I remember in my very first IT job, I ordered a fleet of of the 6x86 based computers.
Thanks for creating this video. I have been a Cyrix fan since the first computer in our household in the late 1990's. It was a IBM Aptiva computer, and had the 6x86L chip in it. The PC came with integrated graphics, I think it was an AMD Mach 64 chip or something of the like, I can't remember for sure. We had a few memorable games on this system, some ran well and some not as well as hoped but still loved it, beat the 386 and 486 processors at the local libraries. The first system I built was with the Cyrix MII 433 PR chip, and it was a great processor for anything but gaming, but it didn't help that I had sourced a 3D labs Permedia 2V graphics card to go with it :(. I think it had 64 MB of memory. I still have the system stored somewhere. Watching this video makes me want to dig it out and try to boot it up in Windows 98 for old times sake. Thanks for the memories!
my 2nd PC was a Cyrix P166+ and i loved it. All my friends' parents had bought them "real quality" from intel, but could only afford 486's and i was way ahead.
Ah, those were the days ...
Wasn´t cheap. Remember for $300 a Celeron.. worked pretty well.
You should do a similar video about 3dfx and the voodoo card.
man you brought back sweet memories.
I had the 5500 model, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5
voodoo, man i havent heard that in a long time.
Videoman2000 check out LGR Tech Tales. He does a great video on 3dfx and Voodoo.
+MR cool man, what OS are using? Linux?
Remember playing Blood 2?! ;D
www.bundlestars.com/en/game/blood-ii-the-chosen-and-expansion
+MR That was one helluva game, along with System Shock 2 and Dues Ex,
www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/fps-heroes-bundle
I still remember its music, esp. this one: th-cam.com/video/RyD4r4AR6Xo/w-d-xo.htmlm
Terminal Velocity, Fury3, and Hellbender were all really great flying shoot-em-up games.
What a great revisit of history. I love Cyrix and owned a handful of their processors. I was always a fan of their underdog status
There is also an odd twist missing from this story. I worked for a company in Dallas TX that was hired to evaluate the building that Cyrix had formally owned. A story told to us, that I had read about in the paper, was that Cyrix was far behind on getting their chip out. they had been telling their investors it was almost ready and it was going to blow everyone away. one day Masked men with automatic weapons came through the front door. rounded everyone up, and stole the designs for the new chip. This lead to Cyrix adding a lot of security camera equipment to the building. which we noticed on our walk through and when asked about it, was told this story.
As we walked through the abandoned building. there were cases of processors holding doors open. x-ray images on the walls, blue prints and designs around and a whole lot of graffiti expressing the then soon to be former employee's anger and frustration with VIA and presumably the whole situation going on. there were prototype processors laying around. tons of chips with covers off so you could see the insides, full desks of stuff people just up and walked away from. It was as if one day, they building had just been locked and that was the end. which might have been what actually happened. this was about 1999 or maybe 2000 when we were there so they had to have closed, at least the then former HQ sometime prior to that. It was just the most bizarre thing to be walking through this abandoned company with everything just left there like some post apocalyptic scene.
There are similar scenes when most companies go under, one day you just can't pay the workers any more or the company that bought you for your name and IP don't want to pay workers any more and so tools have to be downed and work stopped and left as-is at that moment in time. The DeLorean factory in Northern Ireland had to be placed under armed guard when it closed because fans of Back to the Future kept trying to steal half-assembled DeLoreans.
I think the armed guards at the former DeLorean factory had more to do with the Troubles then Back to the Future fanboys. IIRC he managed to piss off both the Provos and the Unionists.
Well that's very sad story. Thanks for sharing it with us.
That was a scene from terminator 2. lol, seriously though I sold Pc;s for a living back in the day and I well remember the launch of this processor, I supported it as a product as a viable alt to intel. interesting to read this story.
Also, the armed man was muttering something about some "Connor, John"...
Yup, back in the day I needed to play Quake at decent speed, since I couldn't aford a Pentium so I got a 586 instead. The performance was so disappointing that it stings to this day...
i have the same experience, i bought a cyrix chip back in the day that i could barely afford, only to find out it was useless for me and it took me 4 more years to finally be able to buy an actual good gaming PC :(
Yeah I did the same thing. Ended up replacing it with a used Pentium 120. Then the 686 came out saying "pentium compatible" etc. Just rubbed salt in the wound.
+raafmaat
Ouch 4 years.
Hahaha. I remember buying Pentium-100 (after getting rid of my AMD 486DX2 machine) just to be able to play Quake at decent FPS. Couldn't afford a Voodoo card though.
For some time upgrading my hardware used to be driven of by id Software releasing a new title. I've bought a Verite video card at Quake II release - Voodoo II was still too expensive.
The Cyrix CPU worked OK until you got the chain gun. Then it would go pop, ... pop, .... pop I could count the time between bullets. That's the moment I remembered thinking, I got to get a Pentium.
My first PC had a 586 Cyrix chip. Was okay, ran some games like Terminal Velocity very well.
They were very snappy in windows from memory, it really just seemed to be (some) games where they suffered.
I can't remember ever buying an Intel cpu, though I have been given several PCs/laptops with them.
The AMD x2-3600 was probably my favourite, even though it wasn't a particularly fast model. It was more than fast enough for what I wanted, and seemed efficient and reliable. I even ran the much maligned Vista on it, and loved it, though it was several years old by then, so was more like Windows 7 but with the prettier Vista interface.
This is a great video. Love how you showed the Overdrive chip that I had back in the 486 era of pc. Everyone around me had the 33-66mhz 486 models and i ended up with the fastest 486 i seen in the area at 75mhz. Didnt get to examine this pentium 1 era stuff until pentium 4 generation was here and computers became way more disposible apparently cuz thats the time period i seen the most curbed pcs as well.
I had a Cyrix 150 and it was awful seeing friends with Pentium 75's absolutely smashing it in Quake, even with a Voodoo card.
i had the same one, "150+" @ 120mhz. was useless :( still have the CPU itself but nothing else
Difference got MUCH larger with Voodo card then without compared to intel. For some reason intel just ran much better framerates when combines with graphics accelerator card.
Intel really destroyed them when they released those Celeron’s with no cache that could be overclocked from 300 to 450mhz. Cut them off at the low end.
only the first Celeron 266MHz Covington had no cache. The next one 300A Mendocino had some cache which made it significantly faster then Covington.
When the Celerons first came out, we had a customer who would buy a handful at a time, because he was attempting to overclock them to break the 1GHz barrier that hadn't been broken yet. He was able to reach 900MHz without any problem, but kept burning up the processors as he neared the 1GHz mark.
@@solardarkside455 I had a customer... a rich customer that bought the cryogenic PC case to get it over 1ghz... odd to hear the refrigerator startup before the PC did...
Those ugly things can still be found.
Thank you for making this video. I had never heard of Cyrix and I ran across a Cyrix MII 366gp in my Socket 7 Amptron PM-585LMR family motherboard I was using to replace my 1993 Canon's i486's system with. Had to look it up for it's history and I was pleasantly surprised to find this.
Working at a PC builder in the UK I have very fond memories of these processors, without them I doubt the company I worked for would have survived as long as it did building budget PC's that many people in the UK got to use and enjoy.
Still use the AMD Geode LX800 in systems my employer sells today (PC-104 based). So glad it's not Intel. The story reminds me of my days at Commodore. Good job sir!
williamhoodtn Yeah, for low power jobs, the Geode series beats most other x86 chips, including some Atoms. There is something really nice about running an x86 utility system on less than 10W and with no cooling or heatsinks. May need to switch to an ARM system for the next upgrade.
12:18 I love how it says "CyrixInstead" I actually upgraded from a P120 to a Cyrix II which was 200mhz I think.
This popped up in my feed. Some great memories revived of those days.
Loved the video.subbed. was a proud Cyrix 386 owner back in the day.
Damn, I remember a time when there were many processors in the market aside from AMD and intel! And not only Cirix, but also VIA, Centaur, and Transmeta. Loved reading about every new one in PC Magazine, being endlessly dazzled by the benchmarks. A new processor seemingly every other week, blowing all the previous ones out of the water (till the next one came out). It seemed the sky was the limit 2 the improvements in performance. And now we got only 2 choices and every new processor of each company is worth a kidney...shit!
Jamie Ramone That last part - Intel, yeah, for sure - but not AMD. AMD's killing it right now; one can buy a brand new unlocked 8c/16t CPU for ~$300 today (R7 1700)*.
As you'll probably recall, Intel's 7700k (4c/8t) was ~$350, and their Broadwell-e 8core ~$1000. Intel has cut prices (finally), after feeling threatened by AMD in the desktop market, but not as low as AMD's.
*And an unlocked 6c/12t from team red only runs about ~$200, and a 4c/4t ~$100 (although I'm not sure I'd recommend the latter; maybe, though)
Unrelated to most of your comment, but just wanted to put that out there
Oh, yeah, the latest AMD processor IS cheaper. I do agree with that. And if they manage to start a price war with intel and keep them cheap 4 a while, I'd b very happy. Still, I think 300$ is expensive.
Jamie Ramone Yeah, that's fair. And I also agree with the rest of your comment - more companies in the x86 desktop game again would be nice (and if they were cheaper, of course, which would probably happen as a result)
Do you remember when one of the 3 factories on the planet that produced memory modules burnt down? Suddenly all the prices for RAM in magazine ads were POA and organised gangs were stealing lorryloads of RAM. It was bizarre.
You've never heard of PowerPC and SPARC?
6:20 - 400MB drive costs 1337.86, best number ever 👌
I recently found a tape from I think either 1999 or 2000 where my Dad (God rest him) was talking about Qualcomm and how they were coming up and how ARM was going to start becoming more a thing.
Fucking seeing into the future Dad, and then getting to enjoy it up until last year. God damn I miss him, wish I could talk tech with him still.
I had a Cyrix 5x86-133 running at 160 by changing the FSB to 40Mhz instead of 33Mhz and it was a good upgrade for my 486 system, it made it competitive to the P75s and P100s of the time.
The last cyrix CPU I had was a 1.0ghz. They were around during the times of the intel p3. I think by then cyrix was part of via though.
My second PC had a Cyrix 233 chip ( big upgrade from my previous 486 DX33 ! ). Back then they were loads cheaper than Intel chips, and still worked pretty well
I didn't know Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome used to also own a CPU company. Fascinating.
Good video. I remember having one of these chips with the green heatsink.
Excellent video. Took me back to my teenage years :) I remember the Cyrix Chips well. Also love the end music :)
+Retr0Rewind - Teenage years? Hell - it took me back to my early 30s. :-)
First PC I built for myself was using a Cyrix 686 when I was in junior high
Leonard cool. My first was a 286 16Mhz in ninth grade back in 1991.
Ryan Yoder same here time flies circa 1991
Thankyou so much for this lovely trip down memory lane! =:oD
I bought my first PC in the mid-90s: A very, *very* cheap 2nd hand 386 system with a 100MB harddrive and 2MB of RAM , that I then started gradually upgrading as funds permitted. My initial rule of thumb for upgrading the processor was "when I can get a significant speed -boost for £10 or less, I'll bite!". I progressed upward from my original 486sx33 through 66Mhz, then 100, then 133, that last one being (I think) my first Cyrix chip. And the more I learned about the tussles between Cyrix and Intel, the more determined I became to never buy another Intel chip, so long as they were the market leader and calling all the shots.
Over time the price I was willing to pay for each upgrade increased, especially once I moved out of the Civil Service and into a private sector job (with a resulting 25% jump up in salary! =:oo ). My policy changed to "when I can get twice the power for about the same amount I paid last time, it's time to upgrade"; And eventually the "best of the underdogs" was no longer Cyrix, or VIA (I think I bought *one* of their chips?) , but AMD. Every CPU I've bought since the early 2000s has been an AMD (and most of them 2nd hand!). Yeah, even this disastrously power-hungry FX-8350 (which over the years has probably cost me in energy bills more than 10 times the price difference to have got an equivalent Intel processor, *and the necessary change of motherboard*, back at the time I bought it! =:o1 ).
Alas, thanks to burnout I've gone from that lavish private-sector IT-job salary to barely scraping by on the wages of a 3-days-per-week retail-worker. But one day, hopefully Real Soon Now(TM), I'll finally enter the Ryzen age (Probably a 2nd-hand Zen 2)! This FX-8350 system will probably be "downgraded" to its old, less power-thirsty Athlon II chip, and become my backup server (which only needs to be booted up for a few hours per week anyway.)
Thanks again. [SALUTE]
=:o}
1994, Cyrix 486 DX2-66, college time ☺😊