What Happened to Cyrix Processors? | Nostalgia Nerd

Intel vs AMD? Forget it. The processor wars of the 90s are almost as legendary as Sega vs. Nintendo or Amiga vs. Atari. While Intel was improving the 386 and 486, competitors popped up like AMD and Cyrix, leaving Intel with a lot more competition on their hands than today, and various lawsuits followed along the way. These companies were dedicated to overtaking Intel in the processor race, and when Intel jumped to the Pentium, Cyrix and AMD weren't far behind with 5x86 and 6x86 processor iterations (AMD with their K6). This video will explore the whole Cyrix story, from their setup to their unfortunate demise. Along the way I'll ask the important question; Did Quake kill off Cyrix? Was it the undoing of an entire processor designer?.... It's a question which has basis in the Cyrix 686 processor's poor FPU performance and John Carmack's coding which leaned heavily on Intel FPU design. But it might not be the only reason why this silicon chip designer bit the bullet. This is an era where it wasn't just Intel vs AMD, or a simple price vs performance war. This was an era of Intel vs AMD vs Cyrix vs IDT, and for me, having lived through it, it's absolutely fascinating.

Sit back and witness glorious CPUs like the Cyrix 5x86, the 6x86, the MediaGX and the MII series. Along with early math co-processors that helped to make early x86 machines fly father than an IBM blue lightning chip set.