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Quake logo meaning8/29/2023 ![]() The Cyrix 486 DLC wasn't able to compete with Intel's 486SX offering clock-by-clock, but it was a fully 32-bit chip and sported 1KB of L1 cache, while costing significantly less.Īt the time, enthusiasts loved the fact that they could use a 486DLC which ran at 33 Mhz to achieve comparable performance to that of an Intel 486SX running at 25 MHz. They were also pin-compatible with the 386SX and 386DX, meaning they could be used as drop-in upgrades on ageing 386 motherboards, and manufacturers were also using them to sell budget laptops.īoth variants offered slightly worse performance that an Intel 486 CPU but significantly better performance than a 386 CPU. ![]() In 1992, Cyrix unveiled its first CPUs, the 486SLC and 486DLC, which were intended to compete with Intel's 486SX and 486DX. This made it possible to pair an AMD 386 CPU and a Cyrix FastMath co-processor and get 486-like performance at a lower price, which caught the industry's attention and encouraged Rogers to take the next step and pursue the CPU market. ![]() The company's first math coprocessors outperformed Intel equivalents by ~50% while also being less expensive. Rogers embarked on an aggressive pursuit to find the best engineers in the US and proceeded to become an infamously hard-driving leader for a team of 30 people that were tasked with the impossible. These were some of the greatest minds to leave Texas Instruments and they had high ambitions to take on Intel and beat them at their own game. Modest BeginningsĬyrix was founded in 1988 by Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman, starting out as a manufacturer of high-speed x87 math co-processors for 286 and 386 CPUs. That success can be attributed at least in part to Cyrix, a company that had a window of opportunity to capture the home PC market and leave both Intel and AMD in the dust, but ultimately failed to execute and quickly disappeared into the tech graveyard. After cloning a few more generations of Intel CPUs, AMD came up with its own architecture, which by the end of the nineties were well regarded in terms of price and performance. This was around the same time AMD was liberating its processors from the negative aura of being second-sourced from Intel. Arm was only a tiny flame sparked by Apple and a few others, and was almost entirely focused on developing a processor for the infamous Newton. It looked like Intel was winning despite fierce competition in the microprocessor space Apple switched to IBM's PowerPC architecture, while Motorola's 68K chips were slowly dragging Commodore's Amiga PC to the grave. The early 1990s were a strange time for the desktop computing industry. Most of you are no doubt familiar with Intel and AMD, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and possibly even VIA – but there's another precursor chip maker that you should be familiar with.įor the better part of a decade, Cyrix brought the world of personal computing to millions in the form of attainable budget PCs, only to be killed by its best product and its inability to run a popular game, followed by a bad merger with a larger partner.
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