Performance Chips

Cyrix was a CPU manufacturer that began in 1988 in Richardson, TX as a specialist supplier of high-performance math co-processors for 286 and 386 systems. more...

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The company was founded by former Texas Instruments staff members and had a long but troubled relationship with TI throughout its history.

Cyrix founder Jerry Rogers aggressively recruited engineers and pushed them, eventually assembling a small but efficient design team of 30 people.

Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor, November 11, 1997.

Products

The first Cyrix product for the PC market was a X87 compatible FPU coprocessor. The Cyrix FasMath 83D87 and 83S87 were introduced in 1989. The FasMath was the fastest 386-compatible coprocessor and provided up to 50% more performance than the Intel 387DX.

Its early CPU products included the 486SLC and 486DLC, released in 1992, which, despite their names, were pin-compatible with the 386SX and DX, respectively. While they added an on-chip L1 cache and the 486 instruction set, performance-wise they were somewhere between the 386 and the 486. The chips were mostly used as upgrades by end users looking to improve performance of an aging 386 and especially by dealers, who by changing the CPU could turn slow-selling 386 boards into budget 486 boards. The chips were widely criticized in product reviews for not offering the performance suggested by their names, and for the confusion caused by their naming similarity with Intel's SL line and IBM's SLC line of CPUs, neither of which was related to Cyrix's SLC. The chips did see use in very low-cost PC clones and in laptops.

Cyrix would later release the Cyrix 486SRX2 and 486DRX2, which were essentially clock-doubled versions of the SLC and DLC, marketed exclusively to consumers as 386-to-486 upgrades.

Eventually Cyrix was able to release a 486 that was pin-compatible with its Intel counterparts. However, the chips were later to market than AMD's 486s and benchmarked slightly slower than AMD and Intel counterparts, which relegated them to the budget and upgrade market. While AMD had been able to sell some of its 486s to large OEMs, notably Acer and Compaq, Cyrix had not. The Cyrix chips did gain some following with upgraders, as their 50-, 66- and 80 MHz 486 CPUs ran at 5 volts, rather than the 3.3 volts used by AMD, making the Cyrix chips usable as upgrades in early 486 motherboards.

In 1995, with its Pentium clone not yet ready to ship, Cyrix repeated its own history and released the Cx5x86, which plugged into a 486 socket, ran at 100, 120 or 133 MHz, and yielded performance comparable to that of a Pentium running at 75 MHz. Although AMD's Am5x86 was little more than a clock-quadrupled 486 with a new name, Cyrix's 5x86 implemented some Pentium-like features.

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