What happened to Cyrix?

[nochay]

Anyone know what happened to cyrix? Did the company tank?

I remember seeing a article in a magazine in 1998 about the owner (in texas where the plant is/was located) who was planning a chip called cayenne. Did this even come out? The article was in a magazine called Boot, now called Maximum pc.

Dane

[vass0922]

I believe VIA bought them out.. think they started making some cheap chips based on Cyrix.

Not sure about the status now.

[HeadBand]

they make the miniitx formfactor now with integrated fanless cpus

[Peter M]

Cyrix got absorbed into National Semiconductors. They sold the CPU business off to VIA very soon after, while they kept the integrated-CPU branch until very recently, when it got sold off to AMD.

VIA in turn acquired Cyrix CPU business about at the same time as they bought the WinChip team off IDT. Cyrix's then hottest chip, the M-III, made it into sample state, but then was dropped in favour of the WinChip architecture for various reasons - Cyrix engineers leaving by the dozen, problems making the M-III at useful speed grades, these things. Meanwhile, the WinChip had successfully been migrated from socket-7 to socket-370, still a small die, cheap to manufacture at good yield, albeit with much worse per-clock performance than any other CPU.

So the "Cyrix III" that actually made it onto retail shelves wasn't a Cyrix at all, it was a WinChip. The latter line has been continued to today's VIA processors, while the Cyrix legacy is gone, all that remains being a shedload of patents and brilliant ideas. VIA since emphasize on the WinChip's strength - small die size, low power consumption.

[elroy]

In the early days Cyrix chips and IBM chips were the same thing. Cyrix got a bad rep years ago. Performance wise they were not as good as Intel or AMD but you could buy them for 1/2 the cost of Intel chips. I had dealers tell me that Cyrix chips wouldn't run Windows and other programs too. I used many of them and never had a problem.

[noprob]

I really liked the (older) Cyrix cpu as it allowed me to play within it's architecture to evaluate the best performance gain by allowing me to configure it's commands.
With the few programs I could locate online.

[Chiguy]

I got a couple Cyrix 486 chips back at home. Still up and running.

[wju425]

I had a cyrix 233 mmx for a long time because it's what I can afford then. At 187 mhz its PR is 233 (sounds familiar?)

Later I replaced it with an intel 233 mmx and it was faster. I would rate the cyrix PR200 as it'll match intel 200 if not faster. Interesting thing is cyrix has 64k L1 cache while intel had 32k L1 cache. The L2 caches are on mobos. Remember the old sockets 7s and that they take amd, intel, and cyrix cpus?

\o/ Billy

[nochay]

I had heard that people hated the cyrix processors, as some of them are plagued with crappy math calculation, and lackluster speed. It's been a long time since I heard something about the company, and it's pretty cool that you guys filled me in Thanks!

Dane