18 Facts About Cyrix

Cyrix Corporation was a microprocessor developer that was founded in 1988 in Richardson, Texas, as a specialist supplier of floating point units for 286 and 386 microprocessors.

In 1992, Cyrix introduced its own i386 compatible processors, the 486SLC and 486DLC.

Combination of these events led Cyrix to begin losing money, and the company merged with National Semiconductor on 11 November 1997.

In 1995, with its Pentium clone not yet ready to ship, Cyrix repeated its own history and released the Cyrix Cx5x86, which plugged into a 3.

Cyrix 5x86 was a cost-reduced version of the flagship 6x86 (M1).

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The Cyrix MII, based on the 6x86MX design, was little more than a name change intended to help the chip compete better with the Pentium II.

In 1996, Cyrix released the MediaGX CPU, which integrated all of the major discrete components of a PC, including sound and video, onto one chip.

Cyrix had always been a fabless company: Cyrix designed and sold their own chips, but contracted the actual semiconductor manufacturing to an outside foundry.

In 1994, following a series of disagreements with TI, and production difficulties at SGS Thomson, Cyrix turned to IBM Microelectronics, whose production technology rivaled that of Intel.

Unlike AMD, Cyrix had never manufactured or sold Intel designs under a negotiated license.

Cyrix's designs were the result of meticulous in-house reverse engineering, and often made significant advances in the technology while still being socket compatible with Intel's products.

Cyrix was found to never have infringed any patent held by Intel.

Cyrix was free to have their products manufactured by any manufacturer that had a cross-license with Intel, which included SGS Thomson, IBM, and others.

Intel and Cyrix now had full and free access to each others' patents.

The IBM manufacturing agreement remained for a while longer, but Cyrix eventually switched all their production over to National's plant.

Cyrix's failure is described by Glenn Henry, CEO of Centaur Technology, thus: "Cyrix had a good product, but they got bought by a 'big smokestack' company and they got bloated.

When VIA bought Cyrix, they had 400, and we had 60, and we were turning out more product.

Cyrix became concerned about the potential name conflict, and contacted the film production company.