If we think about x86 processor manufacturers, Intel and AMD usually come to mind. But the reality is that throughout history there were also other companies that marketed their own chips under the aforementioned architecture. Cyrix was one of themand from its beginnings it strived to get a place in the sector based on a very peculiar strategy.
To immerse ourselves in this story we must travel back, specifically towards the end of the eighties. Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman, two former employees of the American semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments, founded Cyrix in 1988. The firm’s first business was offering floating point units (FPUs) for the 286 and 386 processors.
Cyrix enters the CPU market
The FPUs turned out to be a real success for Cyrix. Their coprocessors were so good that they surpassed those of the competition. In practice, for example, using this component made it possible to significantly improve the performance of the 386 processors, all with a fraction of what it would cost to buy a new chip. Those results prompted the company to take the next step.
The idea of jumping into the world of CPUs made a lot of sense. Cyrix was sure it had the talent and resources, but it also had a major obstacle: to manufacture a processor with an x86 instruction set, it was necessary to have a license. And, to have that license, he would have had to knock on the door of Intel, a giant that could have felt threatened.
That’s when Cyrix decided to take a different path: resort to reverse engineering. After hard work, and hiring external foundry companies, a characteristic that would make it a company Cyrix began to market its first processors, the 486SLC and 486DLC, which could be thought to compete directly with Intel’s 486SX and 486DX, but that was not really the case.
Cyrix M II – 433GP
The disadvantage of these products was that, no matter how cheap they were, they had lower performance than the “equivalents” from the Santa Clara company. The 33 MHz 486DLC, for example, had performance comparable to Intel’s 25 MHz 486SX. Despite this, some enthusiasts found economic advantages in these chips and opted for them, although their nomenclature was clearly confusing for many.
Now, things got complicated when Intel launched its first Pentium line processor in 1993. As a result of this movement, the price of the 486 plummeted, so there were fewer and fewer reasons to choose economic alternatives. Cyrix’s strong point was allowing users to upgrade their existing motherboards and get a performance boost at a low price.
The rise of Pentium and Intel’s new P5 microarchitecture only complicated things for Cyrix. The company tried to catch up with new versions of its processors, even scaling the speeds to 100 MHz and 133 MHz, but these lacked many performance-enhancing features found in processors from Intel and even AMD.
Intel Pentium processor
The new Cyrix 6×86, for example, ran at a slower speed than the direct Pentium processor with which it intended to compete and, as if this were not enough, it did not support the instruction set full Intel P5. This is where everything became much more complex. The software world was optimizing towards Intel’s P5, while Cyrix was playing catch-up with some delay.
One of the hardest blows the firm received occurred after the launch of ‘Quake’ in 1996. The id Software title became a real success, but computers with the most advanced Cyrix processors, which even promised to surpass The Pentiums were not capable of offering a decent gaming experience. Meanwhile, Intel customers did not have these problems.
Battles, victories and defeats
At first, Cyrix could not convince large computer manufacturers to incorporate its chips. This came amid a court battle in which Intel alleged patent infringement. The Santa Clara company ultimately did not get what it wanted and Cyrix emerged victorious when Justice allowed it to manufacture its x86 chips in cross-licensed foundries.
After enormous efforts, the firm founded by Rogers and Brightman secured an agreement to bring its chips to some inexpensive devices from Compaq, Packard Bell and eMachines. The protagonist of this achievement was the MediaGX, a proposal launched in 1996 that included sound and video on the same chip. After this move, Cyrix soon merged with the giant National Semiconductor.
But National Semiconductor and Cyrix’s approach was different. While the first wanted to focus on the manufacture of low-performance chips, the second was still determined to reach and even exceed Intel’s proposals. That merger did not go on the right track and Cyrix ended up in the hands of VIA, a company that used the name “Cyrix”, but not its chip design capacity.
The last Cyrix-designed product to hit the market was called the MII-433GP. It was a processor that operated at 300 MHz, but it arrived at a time when the competition already exceeded 1,000 MHz. Despite its unfortunate fate, we cannot deny that Cyrix managed to overcome several lawsuits, with results in its favor, and had the courage to try to get a place in the great PC processor industry.
