You could make money building PCs back then, or doing virus removal. PCs were around $2000.00, you could built one for under a $1000.00, sell it for a decent amount and still save the customer money. Virus removal (remember internet is just becoming huge, AOL dialup) viruses everywhere. $50.00 and you would be back online, I had computers lined up for days.
As a former field service engineer, I fitted a few of them at small business IT departments and factories around the Thames Valley in the 90s. They were a saviour to many.
yeah, i remember buying a pr233+ cuz the pentium was outa my price range 😀 but it was detected as a 486 and wouldnt run a particular piece of software i had 😉
@@chuckmiller5763 Wow that's... interesting. Living in an ex commie land (Poland to be precise) you could get a decent PC for a small fraction of this money. And I'm not joking: around 1998/early 1999 my 15 year old self was able to build pretty solid PC with my own savings from allowance. In a country, mind it, where median salary at the time was something akin to 300$ a month, so it couldn't have costed me more than $200-$300. Obviously for a new PC you would have to add a price of most basic peripherals (I was reusing monitor, keyboard, mouse, and probably a sound card, and akso possibly a cd drive) but still... (if you wonder about specs -It was a celeron 333 which I run permanently overclocked at 415 Mhz with a RivaTNT based GPU and... I have no real idea how much RAM, as I was constantly upgrading. Damn it was 20 years ago and I still remember building the rig.
@@chuckmiller5763 That's exactly what I did. To be able to learn the technical stuff to properly build PC's professionally. I worked Pro Bono for 3 months at my friend's father PC Store. My brothers were having cool vacations in Europe and Miami while I was having my ass worked off for free figuratively speaking, to learn the non-accessible knowledge that lead me to have my own business 1 year later. I was 15 years old only. When my father saw my initiative and determination, he fully backed me up by giving me an office at home with a personal phone number, fax machine, furniture and supplies. Also, he bought me professional tools and specialized software to do my job easier. My brother and sister hated me to their cores. When I started computer engineering at college, I already had 3 years of field experience and was the best student by far. Students hated me for it too but I was able to date the prettiest girls at college, because they all wanted good grades. Had a new girlfriend every semester and not proud of it, mostly ashamed of it, there were a couple of occasions when I manage to have 3 GF's at the same time. I guess was lucky to have the brains and the looks. lol. I was sleeping only 2-3 hours per day because I've never stopped working.
I'll never forget Cyrix. I remember being amazed at the engineering behind a chip that was compatible with Intel, without copying Intel in any way. This was the first time that I felt, as a consumer, the need to be part of something. Who could have forseen that would eventually lead to my tech addiction.
Working at a computer store in the mid 90s, we were standing around the store joking around, and my buddy suddenly points to the Cyrix in the display and busts out with the Crocodile Hunter voice; "Crikey it's a Cyrix Processor! A rare, nearly extinct species... Isn't she gorgeous! It's amazing how she moves so slowly, yet manages to survive in the wild!" I was in tears laughing at that one, so I'll never forget it
i remember back in the day buying a 486dx2 and getting it home and with sweaty hands (it cost a fortune) fitted it in my pc only to find it didnt boot :( , i had put it in the wrong way around and i thought i had killed it ! .... but turned it around and it worked . my mrs found out how much i spent on it and went mental , we broke up a year later as she said i spent to much time and money on my pc . i found out later she had been having an affair with the it guy at her work . ironic mutch
I remember having to buy a new PC ring around top of the line intel 486 Dx2-66 in 1993 just to be able to play doom. It did cost a fortune. Fortunately as a college student, I was working and not paying rent thank's to the generosity of my parent's(basement was mine). Then I made a mistake of going to a sound blaster expo show and another expense was needed, an overpriced creative wave blaster board which required 2 pci slots to operate, a SB 16 bit stereo & a SB wave blaster daughter board, a few months later a new marvel was released and I bought it too, a creative sound blaster awe 32 which accepted regular simm memory and only required 1 PCI slot to operate, which brought countless hours of joy playing PC games thru unique wave synthesis(MIDI synthesizer). Most people used to listen thru a mono speaker from a PC and I had an orchestra while playing my fav games. Those were the days when having a PC gaming ring required to have a Mobo with 5 PCI slots available. 3 for video(1x 2d video card + 2x 3dfx voodoo cards(SLI mode) and 2 for audio (SB 16 bit + SB wave blaster).
Sorry to hear that. Seems like you ex had an inclination for technology anyway. Currently, my wife is extremely happy that I completely moved away from PC gaming/PC Server projects at home to PS4 pro(for gaming) and to ARM64 SBC boards like the cheap raspberry Rpi4's 8Gb and Odroid boards as N2/N2Plus and C4, which keep me occupied during my spare time at home and specially during the long winters in East Canada. The expense is much less now once you're are setup with mandatory accessories which are way cheaper than PC ones.
Just some interesting info from manufacturers in Taiwan regarding Cyrix MediaGX/Geode... They are extremely popular for making video slot machines, popular enough that some small manufacturers are buying recycled circuit boards that contains the version of the Geode/GX chip they need, desolder and test each chip before reusing them. And they have tested offerings from VIA, when mentioning VIA, the normally polite and timid engineer started to curse out loud about how crazy buggy VIA's CPU are...
that's insane. Don't they just use microcontrollers for those things? Certainly don't need an x86 to run something like that. Even ARM or MIPS would work and as cheap as Geode if not cheaper. This is the reason you don't bet on products with low life expectancies, the product disappears.
MrTweetyhack notice the video part. You can't really expect that much 2D graphics performance from MCU, and it could do a little bit of 3D effect from time to time as well. I think mediaGX is just barely enough to do it and cheap enough for good profit.
I remember trying to play Sonic the Hedgehog on Windows 98SE. It wouldn't work on Cyrix processors, since it did a CPU check on boot of the game to check the strength of the processor. I ended up downloading an unofficial Cyrix driver that fooled the game into thinking it was an Intel chip. Worked great, but a pain for some games.
I had the same problem with the original release of Final Fantasy VII, it would run to a certain point in the game and crash unless you had the Cyrix Driver, I personally owned the MX200 PR at 160mHz and a Trident64 2d card and Voodoo2 8meg adapter for graphics. LOL, what difference a decade does for our current gaming hardware.
I remember the Pentium CPU check in games now that you bring it up. I never heard about the driver trick though. What the Cyrix chip could run it did run fast. Still, I always felt like I only had a souped up 486 when I was using it.
+Paul Frederick The problem appeared to be the worst in Windows 95, at least pre-OSR2! (and probably earlier as well) Because Windows 95 reportedly, will report 486 or the like!
It was almost certainly something of this ilk. Many games were unwisely coded to identify whether or not it was running on a Pentium, and would just outright refuse to run if it didn't detect. Obviously this was intended to prevent the game from running really badly on underspecced 486s, but often locked out other perfectly valid non-Intel CPUs I seem to recall G-Police requiring an updated launcher to identify the Cyrix correctly, at which point it would start the game and run reasonably well.
I used to so look forward to getting the "Computer Shopper" multi hundred paged magazine and spooging over all the new tech where I learned about cyrix and stuff. Computer Shopper out shined all the other mags even with it's phone book paper pages.
I agree, I had stacks of "Computer Shopper" magazines and would sift through EVERY page, just like some kid who's face would be pressed against the glass outside a candy store.
Ahhh. Those were the days. 56k modem ads. "Budget" systems for under $2,000. $4000.00 laptops. Articles claiming Dell and Gateway would never sell a sub-$1000 desktop. CRT monitor ads. 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier OEMs. Yes, those were the days. Also.... "Hacking" AT modem commands for faster speed. Usenet BBS "Shotgunning" modems Making fun of people who used AOL Overclocking that had real world uses, not just bragging rights. You could have a desktop case in any color as long as it was beige.
my 2nd PC was a Cyrix P166+ and i loved it. All my friends' parents had bought them "real quality" from intel, but could only afford 486's and i was way ahead. Ah, those were the days ...
No celeron = no affordable computers... Not everyone had $1800 to buy a top computer... Even the aptiva from IBM (Which also didn´t have super CPUs) could cost even $3000.
My second PC had a Cyrix 233 chip ( big upgrade from my previous 486 DX33 ! ). Back then they were loads cheaper than Intel chips, and still worked pretty well
Due to a $200 difference in price, Cyrix was the math co-processor I chose in the mid 90's over Intel. Competition is something Intel hasn't had enough of since the 90's until now. Just yesterday I completed my first AMD build ever, using a Rysen 5 1600. This processor was the same price as the i5 it replaced and challenges any mid range i7 in performance. The ball is your court Intel.
Thank you for making this video. I had never heard of Cyrix and I ran across a Cyrix MII 366gp in my Socket 7 Amptron PM-585LMR family motherboard I was using to replace my 1993 Canon's i486's system with. Had to look it up for it's history and I was pleasantly surprised to find this.
I still have non mx 166L ibm cpu, worked when last used - upgraded to Amd 300 k6 3d now - then programs could use the code on the ibm for additional speed - eg like a variant like 3d now code.
the blue IBM branded heatsink, please don't remove that! Is it in a clone case, or still have it running in the original branded casing, then you have a collectors item that is good for some collectors and tech freaks. 1997, a logical system for some still underdog...
You should make a dedicated video on the nature of the x86 licensing. Intel taking many different early companies to court, rulings for Cyrix being able to make CPU's only through IBM. AMD to this day being the only no-strings-attached x86 licence (other then the fact AMD's licence licence can't be transferred). Lot's of scandalous stuff there. I think it would be a good way to transition to why there were so many x86 CPU makers at first, and now only two (and why it will always be two). I don't think a lot of people understand the full history behind it all, even enthusiast, there is a lot to take in, it would be nice having you break it down. It's super interesting. The same COULD be done for the GPU market, but it's a lot less interesting since licenses/payouts/buyouts/court rulings are not involved. Just the survival of the fittest, either you were purchased by NVidia/AMD, or you simply died by making stupid mistakes and fell behind. Though, if you didn't make a video on Voodoo, it would be worth covering just for that, those cards kinda put true 3D accelerators on the map and in normal people's computers.
Most I've seen blame 3Dfx's move to an in house fab as the main reason for failure. Production rates were super low. In fact, I've seen no one that directly blamed NVidia, other then the fact their cards finally started to surpass Voodoo. NVidia did purchase most of 3Dfx, but only after they were on the brink of total collapse.
I had a Cyrix CPU in an Emachines PC once. Probably better to have just used an abacus to get everything I needed to do done and real playing cards to play solitaire.
Shambler was it the EMachines Etower 366c with the Super Socket 7 Cyrix M II 366 MMX Processor (which had about the same FPU performance of a 233 Mhz MMX Pentium 1) ? I have one (Etower 366c) but I replaced the CPU with a el cheapo AMD K6-2 @ 350 Mhz instead as it performed much better with PC Games than the Lowly M II. The other major upgrade was putting a 3Dfx Voodoo 2000 PCI graphics card in it and a beefier power supply rather than using the horrid ATI Rage iic Integrated graphics
Amazing video! I always wondered what happened to Cyrix because I had a PC while at school with one inside it. Thank you for making this video, brings back very happy memories of secondary school
This was a fun video to watch. I've got a little rivalry going on in my retro room right now. I've got AMD, Intel, and Cyrix 486 machines as well as Intel, AMD, and Cyrix 233 rated socket 7 machines. No real practical reason except to throw the benchmark pack at them and see what each one can do.
I'm a strange sort of computer nerd. I look back at old computer technology with despair rather than nostalgia, because I remember how painfully slow and unreliable it was compared to newer computers. Old computers aren't like old sports cars where they still offer a uniquely thrilling experience -- they're just old, slow, noisy, dusty, and unforgivably beige.
Yes but if you like the old DOS 6.22 /Win 3.1 era retro games like Red Alert, Syndicate (Wars), Dark Forces, Wing Commander, the Lucasarts SCUMM adventures etc, those old machines are the best way to go about it.I wish I had one up and running now as Windows 10 with Dosbox or Vmware is not quite the same thing. There is something satisfying about getting config.sys and autoexec.bat optimised for the most demanding expanded memory intensive games.
@@davekp6773: I would much rather play one of those old games pre-configured to run on a modern OS by a company like GOG.com instead of bashing my head against the wall trying to get it to work on my own, even using period-correct hardware. I'm an adult now, with adult-sized responsibilities, and if I'm playing a video game at all it's because I need a break from stressful things. I admit I _very_ rarely miss the days of making a table of all the IRQ and DMA settings supported by each of my add-on cards so I can figure out which settings will allow all of my hardware to work correctly, but nowadays if I want to do something like that I can just grab one of my 40+ RC cars and tweak the carburetor on its engine instead. At least troubleshooting analog equipment has immediate and easily-discernible effects, whereas digital equipment doesn't work at all until the settings are all configured just-right.
Watching your channel is like watching 3am infomercials with an added amount of entertainment, easy to fall asleep to, and at the same time fun to watch
Ahh... Those days, when Byte Magazine was the highlight of the month, reading Chaos Manor (The great (late) Dr Jerry Pournelle's column). I built my very first PC back in 1996 with a Cyrix 166+ and some cheap VIA based mainboard from AOpen. As a poor student I took great pleasure in having 32 MB of RAM and 3.2 GB HD. Double of what my co-students had in their pre-built machines. It was the same year I first heard about Linux. Man, I'm getting old :-/
In 1991, our first PC was 386, we bought Ultima 7 with it. We immediately went back to Micro Center and bought a sound card and math co-processor. I'm about 75% sure it was a Cyrix. But i was 9 and that was 30 years ago, so i could be mistaken. But that started my family on building our own computers. Cyrix is a name i hadn't heard it years. It takes me back.
What a great video - thank you! I remember reading all sorts of magazines in the 90s and early 2000s about cyrix and i also remember the idt winchip which i remember used to have its main advertising pitch about having the most transistors on a cpu (as opposed to touting performance awards)
My first Windows PC was an Emachines 366e I bought in 1999 for $399 (with a 2-year Compuserve agreement) powered by a Cyrix MII 250 (overclocked I believe, which explains some of the minor instability I experienced. I did have a 386 [I think] in 1995 that was given to me by a neighbor/friend when I was a teenager, but since it only had 1.44" and 5.75" floppy drives and DOS, I didn't really appreciate what I had and didn't know that I could upgrade it with a hard drive, so I left it out by the dumpster in 1996 for another neighbor to take and instead used a Brother word processor to do my homework in highschool- lol). I upgraded my Emachines in 2001 with an AMD K6-II 3DNow 400MHz for $25 purchased on Ebay, and I thought that was a major boost in performance compared to what I had been previously using. I had to set the dip switches (remember those) to a 2x multiplier which the K6-2 interpreted as an x6 multiplier and the bus at 66MHz for stability (probably because I was using 66MHz SDRAM). Two years later, I built my first self-assembled computer with a 1.7GHz Celeron P4, and that thing was screaming fast in comparison to the K6-2.
Yep, I remind that when they got cyrix cpu on their 0.25µ process, the voltage didn't get down. Then they talked about getting quickly to 0.18µ, and as experts explain, that only meant that their actual process was crap.
When I saw a friend 's Cyrix processor, I recall thinking "That's what you get for buying a pre-built kmart PC". I would visit my friend's houses with my Monster 3D II, plugging it into their computer, and showing them what they were missing out on. Same person with the Cyrix then goes out and buys a Banshee ... and again, I roll my eyes. Cyrix was a valid option for budget buyers who knew what they were doing, sure, but just so many people got suckered into the marketing and ended up with a gaming dud, not realizing the difference.
my first build as a kid was an m2 233. I was STOKED because i ordered it through a magazine and it was just called cyrix 233 or something... When i got it i saw it was the m2 and thought to myself "it's like a pentium 2!! What a deal!" Hahaha, i didn't really play games but every time i did try and play one the performance was horrible unless it was an old dos game in 320x240. At one point i blew the chip up overclocking it and had to fall back on a p133, i was amazed that games actually played a bit better on this 1/2 clocked processor. Along with things like encoding mp3's... they were not much slower on the old pentium. Pretty much the only thing that was faster on the cyrix was certain benchmarks that i overly excited my young self on...
Been listening to a bunch of these super fascinating old computer mini-documentaries while working on some artwork. Totally snapped me out of my zone hearing Maine. I live there! I go to school in one of the cities one of their plants was in! Way past cool!
When I went off to college in 1996, I had a PC built for me using graduation gift money and other earnings. It was a 6x86. I do remember plenty of evenings of getting a BSOD on Win95 from the chip overheating, and even had a couple times where I yanked it out to cool down faster to get back into some dorm LAN Quake battles. Yes, it was faster yank it out of the socket and case than to let it cool down on its own!
@@jessfucket Definitely. Over winter break the guys who built it gave me a bigger heat sink and put some heat paste on it as well. Didn't have too many issues after that.
My dad had one of these. I actually remember that we booted a pirated copy of Quake on his rig, only to be disappointed by the Cyrix's lackluster performance. Later on he got the pentium. Oh, the 90s... How I miss that decade.
My first computer I bought as an adult had one of these cpus. I had a 386 as a teen but bought one of these to play baldur's gate games in 1999. Then 3& games. I had a cyrix m2 200mhz that I clocked to 333mhz and ran with a voodoo 3 then a 5 5500. The cpu was the limiting factor for 3d games as even adding a soundbalster live card which did hardware sound processing, gave me a 10+ fPS boost. I started having issues running newer games and upgraded to a p3 650mhz cm with a GeForce 3. Both my cpu and gfx card companies were no longer in business :(
Man! I had not heard the name Cyrix in almost 2 decades. When I graduated college in 1992, I asked all my family members AND in-laws to collect all the money which they planned on spending for my graduation presents, and buy me a 386SX CPU and a motherboard for it, so I could upgrade my PC at that time (was Intel at that time, but I have been using AMD exclusively since mid-1990's).
On the "greater than 13 FPS" part, it was widely known among video game developers at the time that the human eye/brain perceives motion starting at 14 FPS. So many games would actually lock themselves to 14 FPS, since variable frame rates are much more difficult to program, especially before the times of readily adaptable game engines (often you would program a new game from scratch, or carry very small bits of code between projects). I have no idea where the 14 FPS number originated, or if it is backed up by real science.
Wolfenstein, Doom, Heretic, Hexon, Duke Nukem & Quake all very similar, popular games for the PC during the mid 90’s. Wolfenstein & Doom have all had a new lick of paint and released on the PS4, Xbox One & PC. I’ve even got Doom VFR on the PSVR and I wonder what 14yr old me would think of playing Doom VFR after only playing the SNES version of DOOM? I remember playing Doom 2 on the PC and being blown away by the graphics so playing Doom in virtual reality would probably be like a dream where I’m living on one of the Martian moons Phobos or Demos fighting demons & Hell Knights for real. But I always wondered what happened to Quake as it was popular meant to have better graphics than Doom but just disappeared and I forgot about it until this video. Doom went on to have a version on the N64, Doom 64 which I got and thought looked great but as impressive as the version I got for the original Xbox a few years later and we know about the 2 newer games for the PS4 & Xbox One (plus the one especially for the PSVR which is a new game on it’s own)
I made and sold a lot of Cyrix based systems. If the user just wanted to do basic things like browse the early Internet and type some documents, that was all they needed. And they could be quite a bit less than a similar Intel system. And to be honest, I never built an Intel system for myself, finding AMD was as good or better for the same price by the mid-1990s. The last Intel I made for myself was my 80486-50 in 1992.
Following the lineage of Cyrix is fun. Cyrix was born from Ex-TI employees. Cyrix not having its own plant, partnered with TI for manufacturing. Legal issues caused Cyrix to switch to IBM manufacturing which ultimately cost them royalties and a cross-license by allowing IBM to make its own clones of Cyrix processors which they used in their own products. NSD, TI's leading competitor at the time, buys (and merges with) Cyrix and ultimately shutters the IBM deal. NSD sells the Cyrix division to VIA (man the memories) and then ultimately (2011) NSD is acquired by TI as an independently operated child corporation. I think the biggest mistake Cyrix made was selling to NSD, they didn't need NSD's Cross-License agreements with Intel to win against Intel in court, they had already done it twice. All the NSD purchase did was add bloat to their org and bring in a semiconductor manufacturer that thought they could do it better. If Cyrix could have weathered the storm a bit longer, an acquisition by (or of) VIA would have made a lot better sense and could have made Cyrix/VIA a real contender in the x86 competitor market that we might still see today, especially had VIAs other deals like the acquisition of Centaur and the S3 venture. Instead VIA has fallen into moderate obscurity, still producing northbridge chipsets for both Intel and AMD processors among other things. I think had they merged with Cyrix instead of NSD, the world of the microprocessor would be much different today.
My first ibm clone pc in 1993 (or early 94) had a Cyrix 486 DLC-40 with 4mb ram, 2x cdrom dos/win3.1, soundblaster, and svga graphics. A couple months later I swapped the cpu for an intel 486 dx4 100 and added 4mb more of ram to make 8mb. Fun times.
I remember in 1999, i used to go to a friends house and spend loads of my time playing with them on their computers.. one day i was given a p3 450 with a riva tnt2 16mb, 32 megs of ram and a 10gb hdd. one of my m8s who lived there bought it off my other m8 who worked at compaq. no way was it above board haha.. I thank them for getting me my own computer as it helped me learn a lot.
If I remember correctly, I never bought a Pentium. In those days I had Cyrix chips, until at some point AMD became my processor of choice -- it was the K2, I think. Since then, I got my long time desk computer for home at a Ham Fest (looking for yet some more measuring instruments) and instead bought the PC. It happened to be built around Intel chips. At about the same time, I was too busy at work to manage with my pocket calculator, so I bought another fully assembled PC for work use. That one was built around AMD cpu. As it happens, it came to my home upon my retirement and is still on my home lab bench, as it contains some non-transferable programs that I need every now and then. Otherwise, the old Ham fest purchase concked earlier this year. Its replacement is one with a solid state ROM hard disk, quite fast with again an AMD cpu. It is my present work horse, with unfortunately many of my dear programs still missing.
I still have a maxed out Cyrix 486 PC. It was upgraded fully and it did play Quake at 21fps. It does have a diamond multimedia ISA graphic extention card though.
I remember when my brother and I were working for ATI someone gave us a 5 year old PC with a CPU that said Cyrix. I said "I've never heard about that one." and my brother's response was "Well forget it, that company is gone." 😅
I'm still amazed at how all companies were able to use the exact same socket. You could buy a motherboard, and then decide from which manufacturer to buy the CPU.
I love the idea of third parties producing faster CPUs for an older socket, as an upgrade path, so the customer wouldn't need to buy a whole new motherboard just to get a more modern CPU.
I actually am amazed by the reverse - That AMD was able to survive after they suddenly and unexpectedly needed their own chipset, socket and motherboard designs and for companies to get onboard with making boards that were NOT compatible with Intel. The Super Socket 7 was the transition point and luckily it allowed at least older Intel CPUs to still work, giving AMD a decent stopgap.
@@DracoDan2 I'm not that surprised that AMD could adapt. They had experience reverse-engineering chipsets, and if they didn't build their own alternative, they could have probably gotten one from VIA, or many others. Since they already had the socket 7 licence, it probably wasn't that hard to bump the front-side bus an extra 50%. And by "not-hard" I mean relatively. At the time AMD had their own fabs, so they had experts at every level to figure it out.
@@andychow5509 That's not exactly accurate though, they didn't create that bus (EV6), they licensed the technology from DEC who had created it for their Alpha CPU line (before they mistakenly sold out to Compaq). They also did create the first chipset, the AMD 750 before getting help from VIA and their KX/KT133 chipsets.
That's probably one of the reasons why now Intel keeps changing sockets as you change your clothes. Not that anyone would try to make an Intel Core clone these days, but it probably has a paranoia component as well, to be on the safe side. And it's also not that AMD is totally innocent, in spite of its long-lived sockets in recent years. Remember the socket 939 fiasco circa 2010, which left many AMD users fuming?
I literally sent cash money in the mail to cyrix to upgrade my 386 20mhz to 486 33mhz for $120.66. And they found it and shipped it to me after a phone call of course. lol. Love the 90's!
indeed amazing times not processor related but i recall spending hours on the phone with customer support to get a game up(don't recall the title) and running on my weak system. im pretty sure the guy know it wouldn't run on my system from the start but he spent at least 3 hours on the phone trying to walk through every fix he could think of to make it work! something like that would not happen today.
kizonthekeys customer service jobs almost always have a metric that measures productivity. His was probably phone time. He actually got an entire days work done by talking to one person: you!
I miss the old customer service of the 90's: my best experience was with DR Solomon (anti virus) During my studies, I came across a bug in DR Solomon on a P90 (HP) - when DR Solomon and HP Utilities ran at the same time (on Windows 3.11), DR Solomon would crash. So, I phoned our local customer service number (in Denmark) around 15:00-16:00 and was asked when, I normally leave in the morning. I replied about 7:00. "We'll send someone with an upgrade before that". At around 6:45-7:00 there was a knock on the door. Outside, there was a guy with a new set of disks (3.5") and a BIG apology for my inconvenience. Coming home from school that day, I upgraded - and it worked.
@@hagalazmultiverze3411 I made a lot of money removing viruses with Dr Solomon, remember that 3.5 floppy drive boot disk Solomon had so you could scan the HDD and remove the virus.?
Man, I can remember absolutely chomping at the bit in wait for my Cyrix Cx486DX2v66 chip to be delivered to me at work. I ordered it because I was tired of my boss beating me at Doom (on breaks) with his "faster" machine. I only had the SX25 while he was using the latest DX66. You wouldn't think it would make all that much difference, but it did back then. Those few extra mHz made all the world better. Then a few months later he got the Pentium...
Golden words are said at the end of the video. I have the same feelings for Celeron's. Yes - they were cheap and "stupid" processors, but it was thanks to them that many people even had a personal computer at home. The games went slowly, but people still played and rejoiced. Thanks for the video, it was interesting!
So true, I bought a used computer from a high school friend that was a Celeron and it worked for everything I needed at the time. I upgraded from the family Pentium 133mhz to a personal Celeron 350mhz and it was a night and day difference for me.
The thing I'm disappointed in myself for is not getting into more programming in the 90's as a teenager. I was too much into building a PC and browsing the net.
Gabriele Riva, the 80s gave your the Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi. Michael Jackson Thriller and Bad, Tears for Fears, and many great pop songs (90s had pop but it got burried by grunge rock before that got buried by late 90s hip-hop) the Commodore 64, the IBM Compatible PC, and the NES.
It's a struggle to build a contemporary gaming PC under that budget these days. Easy enough with used parts, but if you want everything new, you'll have to compromise.
When i was 16 (in 1995) i started working in a small business that assembled PCs, server and installed network and isdn hardware and cables. One day a customer showed up and ordered the cheapest PC we could build. Cyrix 486, Shuttle mainboard, some noname ram and granpa' finest cookies as harddrive. I spent hours trying to find timings and voltages that all components could agree on. It was the day i learned "jumper kung-fu". 23 years... damn...
Back in the day where there still was noname RAM with which you totally could eff up the whole rig's stability if you put more than just one into it...
I worked for Cyrix. One of my favorite jobs. I was in IT rather than Engineering, but still, it felt like we were fighting the good fight and doing something important.
Yeah, getting kids so disappointed with Quake performance that they shot themselves. Or their parents. We need more space on this planet. Overpopulation, etc. Give yourself a pat on the back.
I played quake on a Cyrix without shooting myself, I did as all the others i knew and bought a Voodoo-card which greatly increased the speed no matter what CPU you had...
You Sir, are a better man than me.What doesn't kill you makes you stronger .I'm writing this from a hell populated by the legions of innocents who used the lords name in vain while contemplating the performance of their Cyrix chip in Doom. Its hot down here. Yes, they use Cyrix down here too.
Again, I was in a support role, not engineering. I cannot tell you why Cyrix didn't focus on floating-point performance (the key to Quake). I can tell you that many of us played Quake (my handle comes from there) on Cyrix chips we got at cost, so I understand the frustration. The Good Fight was to keep competition going. Consumers lose when there is a monopoly. Monopoly means less innovation, higher prices and less choice. No matter whose chip you ran, Cyrix helped you get the best at the lowest price. Meanwhile, I prefer not to comment on other aspects in the above video, especially on Mr. Swent's arrival and what we felt that meant. But the history video could have ended at that point with only a short summation.
I'm joshing, mate. Yes its a great story (true story) but a lot of people were miffed when the system was such a disappointment, after all the hype. The problem is, and its just as true today, the whole truth isn't told. That it was so weak in some important games should have been made clear. That's all. Mom and Pop are not gonna buy Johnny another PC when he tells them the one they thought would make him so happy, didn't. Just read the comments below. People were pissed off. I know it was cheaper but it doesn't matter. People were misled. I would never ever have touched a Cyrix, Via or a Nehemiah. But by then everybody knew their reputation. But they were exciting times.(if you didn't get burned).
Back in the days when overclocking could mean a 50% increase in power! I remember getting a Cyrix P200 (pr200?) and clocking that up to 333. Then upgrading to an AMD on that same motherboard and going to 400mhz!
I can remember getting an occasional AMD K5-75 to clock at K5-PR166 levels (but only some of the VERY early production, most were lucky to hit K5-100 levels).
it became popular in 1998 when all the PC mags started to boost about it on the pentium 2 celeron.... it was very technical though and nobody had fancy Cpu coolers then they were all OEM so pretty risky
A lot of video went into that effort more like. One can only polish a turd so much. We use PCs to play games. The Cyrix couldn't. Therefore it was, is - and always will be, shit. Game over. Yes it is an entertaining video, but it it rambles on a bit at times and the viewer can be still digesting the information when the next hopper load of facts and figures is poured into their brain. My video = Cyrix promised a 747 but delivered a paper plane. 2 pictures, A 747 and a child holding a basic paper dart. Big round of applause. I bow, smiling graciously and a lot of resources burned while watching his video are saved. All very dull but preventing Global warming is dull.
same here. i miss drooling over pcmag and tigerdirect magazines late into the night. i miss the CompUSA flyers that would come every weekend in the newspaper. i miss the demo disks that used to come with PC gaming magazines...just the thrill of playing a few minutes of a new game ran by YOUR computer was better than crack.
Talk about nostalgia. I recently went through old stuff and found a Feb 1997 PC Magazine, and a Maxell DC-6250 1/4" "data cartridge" (=backup tape), among many other things. Fun memories. I happened to open the magazine to an article that starts out "I finally decided to get a new modem....."
I only had a 486sx due to being a kid however I deliberately chose the SX over an AMD as I couldn't bare to have a PC that didn't have an Intel processor. Kids who had AMD's got laughed at in my school, if you had a Cyrix you were pond life, nobody would even speak to you.
First PC I built completely from scratch had a Cyrix CPU as it's all I could afford at the time and had the biggest bang for the buck...Brings a nostalgic tear to the eye...Cue digital lighter...
Yeah, they weren't much, but building them yourself had a certain level of pride. It took me six months to build my own. I didn't have much money, so I would buy a part or two at a time each month until one was built. :) Good times. There's something I miss about those slower, more limited systems and graphics back then.
Same same. It was a crap PC, but man I was I ever proud of that thing. Just the fact I could put something like that together with my own hands and actually have it boot up and run opened up a whole new world.
Awesome Video, but such a sad story. Intel was price gouging their Pentiums (a 166 in 1995-6 could cost you $500) and getting away with it before the 6x86 came along and forced them to drop prices fast. For a while Cyrix was the little company that could. Had Cyrix made their first 6x86's run cool with a fast floating point unit for Quake and 3D gaming they might have made fast fans with gamers instead of getting a bad reputation. But I remember a lot of businesses and schools here in Texas used computers with later lower voltage Cyrix MX and MII CPU's. For office, school work and Non-3D gaming Cyrix CPU's were a good bargain and kept a lot of local "Mom & Pop" OEM computer stores in business. I don't think Quake alone killed Cyrix. It was the combined attack from Intel's Celeron and AMD's K6 family (which were faster and better CPU's for Socket 7) that really did Cyrix in. They couldn't keep up with Intel's and AMD's rapid pace of development and then got gutted. Keep up the awesome work on your videos!
I agree the early Celerons and some later ones were junk chips. But the Celeron 300a (not 300) got a great reputation in the gamer community then for being easy to overclock to 400-450 mhz with a good heatsink. And that you could easily upgrade to a "real" Pentium II when you got the cash or when prices dropped was a nice bonus.
The first computer that I ever owned personally (i.e. not shared with family members) had a Cyrix 133 CPU. Embarrassingly, I always thought it was pronounced "Sear-ix" until I was corrected one day. That day is today.
I remembered that time, I never buy a Cyrix chip but the computer hardware was exciting. New hardware came out every week like 3DFX, Sound cards. Great times ;)
But it makes benchmarks higher, and that's the end all-be all to consumers. Consumers don't always know what they need, and if the marketeers aren't principled enough to inform the consumer, the market is essentially SOL.
@SteelRodent That is not true at all, from what I could tell from the guidance given to developers at the time. All you need is the ability to have some control over instruction execution, which is trivial with JS on the web, and you can sometimes skip software access checks (like JS array index checks) and try and scrape information you shouldn't have from the process memory (like information from other sites), so browsers had to much more carefully keep information out of the site's process.
@@spudhead169 I believe you misread me: "have some control over instruction execution" is the trivial thing, and having that and to be in the same process as some secret data is enough for an attack to be plausible. The problem with assuming that because the attack itself may be very difficult that you don't need to worry about it, is that only one person needs to figure something out and share it for everyone to have access to everyone's secrets, and because the vector is so widespread it was a huge deal.
+MR That was one helluva game, along with System Shock 2 and Dues Ex, www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/fps-heroes-bundle I still remember its music, esp. this one: ua-cam.com/video/RyD4r4AR6Xo/v-deo.htmlm
Hello, I really liked the video many thanks for doing it. However I find some minor imprecise information on Cyrix architecture. Around 17:00 you said that “whilst developing quake John Carmak realized that fpu and integer operation used different part of Pentium core and could be effectively overlapped. This nearly double the speed of fpu intensive game code, however on Cyrix processor the operation didn’t overlap”. This statement was a bit confusing for me so I did some research on the topic. Cyrix is capable of overlapping integer and floating point operation together, in fact was one of the selling point of the advantages of a Cyrix architecture over the Pentium. It is written on the 6x86 manual (datasheets.chipdb.org/Cyrix/M1/6x86/M1-1.PDF). The Pentium core in fact is not able to do that unless the floating point operation is a division. Division is and expensive operation and takes up to 39 cycles on a Pentium to be completed, but Michal Abrash ( this is the engineer responsible for Penitum optimisation in ID software, not Carmack) find out that in the specific case of the division you could pipe up 39 single cycle integer instruction while and division is in executing making it virtually a 1 cycle operation during projection phase. It uses also some extra care to optimise to some degree dot product and matrix multiplication. All of this is very well documented and you can find all the tricks used in Abrash’s book , chapter Floating-Point for Real-Time 3-D (www.drdobbs.com/parallel/graphics-programming-black-book/184404919 ). This optimisation you mentioned in the video was adding a feature that the Pentium lacked and the Cyrix had naturally by not using any tricks. What killed the Cyrix in floating point execution was the lack of pipelining for floating point operation. This massively reduce the throughput especially when you have a long sequence of floating point operation and you have no integer to overlap, like for example in a matrix multiplication. Without a pipelining the cpu have to wait the whole operation to be completed before issuing another, so for example if a multiplication takes 3 cycle you get a multiplication every 3 cycle. With pipelining the cpu can issue another instruction as soon as the current one left the current stage, so in the cpu have still to wait 3 cycle for the first operation to be completed, but all the susequent ones will be completed whitin a cycle of distance. On top of that Cyrix multiplication and Addition takes double cycles than pentium to complete ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87). Concluding the Pentium-specific optimisation helped quake go an extra mile, but ultimately the Pentium had a very high floating point throughput even without specific optimisation compared to Cyrix. Sorry I wrote a long comment but I think it's important to clarify since quake vs Cyrix is kinda the whole point of the video.
For some reason, I understood approximately none of what you said but really enjoyed reading it, fair play on the research and knowledge sharing side of things though, top stuff.
+SteelSkin667: I prefer to have branch prediction in my CPU. If you are doing something important with your PC, then you should have the option to disable that CPU feature.
This was my first PC in 1996: * Cyrix 6x86 P166 * 16MB RAM * 2GB HDD * 16x CD-ROM drive * Aztech audio card (sound blaster compatible) * 4MB ATI 3D video card with MPEG hardware decoder * 15" crt monitor with integrated speakers * PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse * Windows 95 OSR2 OEM
Oh man this takes me back... my first PC was a MITAC brand , 486 DX/2 66Mhz, 8mb of ram it came with OS/2 WARP (we switched to win 95 later) ...it ran doom well. My next PC had the legendary Pentium 166mhz with MMX of course :) I got it to play MDK lol
My first PC in 1988. IBM PS/2 50Z Intel 80286, 10Mhz 4MB RAM 30MB HDD IBM 8512 Color monitor 14" VGA resolution Integrated VGA Display adapter IBM PC DOS Versions 3.30 IBM 101 Keyboard 3.5 1.44Mb floppy drive NO Mouse was needed
That is almost identical to the first pc I ever got (family pc). It was made by time computers and was absolute garbage 😆 I always listed for a pentium - especially the mmx ones. I remember it was actually clocked at 133mhz but was supposed to perform like a 166. In fact for games I can remember my friends having a much better experience on a pentium 120. Still, I did have a mighty good time with that PC. Duke Nukem 3D. Quake 1 etc.
Only time I ever bought a Cyrix chip was in 2000 when Intel introduced its "ID number" anti-piracy measure for the Pentium III. I thought I was being such a consumer privacy activist by boycotting Intel. Oh how naive we were back then.
I sold computers around the time they had their P200 and P233 models. It was really easy to sell to customers. "It's just as fast but cheaper"... that worked always...
@@anonymousinc6330 this could have been avoided by using a good cooler on that microprocessor, which turns out to become pretty hot when operating. However, i know some people who collect old processors. How about designing a motherboard which can hold say about 16 processors in 1 time. Thats a good idea, but the cooling still is neccasary on the processors. They get hot when operationg. The cooling prevents the burn up
It just occurred to me how powerful it would be to download every video on your channel, rip them to VHS tapes, and time travel with them back to 1990 Silicon Valley. Could you even imagine?
Just bring a Ryzen 9 7950x and a x670 MB, a i9 12900k and z690 mb, a WD Gen 4 4tb m.2 a RX6900XT a rtx4090. Drop them off at their respective manufacturers and go back to present times to see how much you disrupted the progression of tech. Oh and don't forget a Displayport to vga adaptor... Lol
@@scottcol23 Wont come back. Have to stay to buy Amazon, Apple around the early 2000s, Bitcoin in the late 2000s, short the banks in 2008 and GME in the 2020s.... then I can tell Bro Musk : Feck orf, imma paying 45b for Twitter and imma blocking your account.
@@keithw4920 Those are worthy pit stops to make lol I was mining bitcoin in 2012 when the price of one coin was about $18. at the time I had 3 Radeon HD 5770's and was getting one BTC every 3 days... Man do I wish I had just known to keep those coins...
@@scottcol23 I had my card out in 2009 wanting to buy some of this new fangled blockshit. Didnt go thru because I couldnt understand the white paper much. Might have sold em at 10 bucks or so though, it would still have been a >10000% profit.
I really liked working at Cyrix in Longmont, CO. I especially remember how awesome the break room was, free soda and a espresso machine. How I got a testing technician job with them is I told the truth about my understanding of Windows, from 1 to 10 (one being the least, 10 being the most). I told them that even the most knowledgeable engineer at Microsoft probably couldn't be more then a 9 and there is so much in regards to the development side that I don't know even exists, so I said a 6. They said every other person they interviewed just blurted out a 10, with no explanation as to why they think they know it inside and out. It had to be the best interview I have ever had. Anyway I did well there and really miss the talking to the cool engineers, but left to help Mike Booth make a video game, Nox in Fort Collins (that is another story).
I find it funny that Longmont has a tech background, my stepdad worked at IBM in Longmont. Cool town now too, now that I'm older. Lots of good microbrews in the city like Left Hand. I kinda miss that town.
I really liked working at Cyrix in Longmont, CO. I especially remember how awesome the break room was, free soda and a espresso machine. How I got a testing technician job with them is I told the truth about my understanding of Windows, from 1 to 10 (one being the least, 10 being the most). I told them that even the most knowledgeable engineer at Microsoft probably couldn't be more then a 9 and there is so much in regards to the development side that I don't know even exists, so I said a 6. They said every other person they interviewed just blurted out a 10, with no explanation as to why they think they know it inside and out. It had to be the best interview I have ever had. Anyway I did well there and really miss the talking to the cool engineers, but left to help Mike Booth make a video game, Nox in Fort Collins (that is another story).
Brilliant as always. I remember the Cyrix chips being like a saviour to us “funds challenged” young pc upgrade enthusiasts in the late 90s.
You could make money building PCs back then, or doing virus removal. PCs were around $2000.00, you could built one for under a $1000.00, sell it for a decent amount and still save the customer money. Virus removal (remember internet is just becoming huge, AOL dialup) viruses everywhere. $50.00 and you would be back online, I had computers lined up for days.
As a former field service engineer, I fitted a few of them at small business IT departments and factories around the Thames Valley in the 90s. They were a saviour to many.
yeah, i remember buying a pr233+ cuz the pentium was outa my price range 😀 but it was detected as a 486 and wouldnt run a particular piece of software i had 😉
@@chuckmiller5763 Wow that's... interesting. Living in an ex commie land (Poland to be precise) you could get a decent PC for a small fraction of this money. And I'm not joking: around 1998/early 1999 my 15 year old self was able to build pretty solid PC with my own savings from allowance. In a country, mind it, where median salary at the time was something akin to 300$ a month, so it couldn't have costed me more than $200-$300. Obviously for a new PC you would have to add a price of most basic peripherals (I was reusing monitor, keyboard, mouse, and probably a sound card, and akso possibly a cd drive) but still... (if you wonder about specs -It was a celeron 333 which I run permanently overclocked at 415 Mhz with a RivaTNT based GPU and... I have no real idea how much RAM, as I was constantly upgrading. Damn it was 20 years ago and I still remember building the rig.
@@chuckmiller5763 That's exactly what I did. To be able to learn the technical stuff to properly build PC's professionally. I worked Pro Bono for 3 months at my friend's father PC Store. My brothers were having cool vacations in Europe and Miami while I was having my ass worked off for free figuratively speaking, to learn the non-accessible knowledge that lead me to have my own business 1 year later. I was 15 years old only. When my father saw my initiative and determination, he fully backed me up by giving me an office at home with a personal phone number, fax machine, furniture and supplies. Also, he bought me professional tools and specialized software to do my job easier. My brother and sister hated me to their cores. When I started computer engineering at college, I already had 3 years of field experience and was the best student by far. Students hated me for it too but I was able to date the prettiest girls at college, because they all wanted good grades. Had a new girlfriend every semester and not proud of it, mostly ashamed of it, there were a couple of occasions when I manage to have 3 GF's at the same time. I guess was lucky to have the brains and the looks. lol. I was sleeping only 2-3 hours per day because I've never stopped working.
I'll never forget Cyrix. I remember being amazed at the engineering behind a chip that was compatible with Intel, without copying Intel in any way. This was the first time that I felt, as a consumer, the need to be part of something. Who could have forseen that would eventually lead to my tech addiction.
Back when PC Magazine was legit.
Back when most of those magazines were still legit and there've been actual journalists...
And those sweet demo discs. Those were the days.
And when there was only on PC Magazine.
Computer Shopper. Anyone remember that?
@@WarrenPostma the size of those mags were amazing.
Somewhere i have a sticker that says “Cyrix Instead” shaped just like the intel inside sticker
Working at a computer store in the mid 90s, we were standing around the store joking around, and my buddy suddenly points to the Cyrix in the display and busts out with the Crocodile Hunter voice; "Crikey it's a Cyrix Processor! A rare, nearly extinct species... Isn't she gorgeous! It's amazing how she moves so slowly, yet manages to survive in the wild!" I was in tears laughing at that one, so I'll never forget it
Totally understandable 🥲
U world you lived in doesn't exist anymore James.
That's better than the old "Crix Sux" on Kali
i remember back in the day buying a 486dx2 and getting it home and with sweaty hands (it cost a fortune) fitted it in my pc only to find it didnt boot :( , i had put it in the wrong way around and i thought i had killed it ! .... but turned it around and it worked . my mrs found out how much i spent on it and went mental , we broke up a year later as she said i spent to much time and money on my pc . i found out later she had been having an affair with the it guy at her work . ironic mutch
ironic indeed, and a good thing for you since computers worth both the money and the time you invested in and never cheats on you...
good riddance. lesson for life. go your own way, do your own thing.
I remember having to buy a new PC ring around top of the line intel 486 Dx2-66 in 1993 just to be able to play doom. It did cost a fortune. Fortunately as a college student, I was working and not paying rent thank's to the generosity of my parent's(basement was mine). Then I made a mistake of going to a sound blaster expo show and another expense was needed, an overpriced creative wave blaster board which required 2 pci slots to operate, a SB 16 bit stereo & a SB wave blaster daughter board, a few months later a new marvel was released and I bought it too, a creative sound blaster awe 32 which accepted regular simm memory and only required 1 PCI slot to operate, which brought countless hours of joy playing PC games thru unique wave synthesis(MIDI synthesizer). Most people used to listen thru a mono speaker from a PC and I had an orchestra while playing my fav games. Those were the days when having a PC gaming ring required to have a Mobo with 5 PCI slots available. 3 for video(1x 2d video card + 2x 3dfx voodoo cards(SLI mode) and 2 for audio (SB 16 bit + SB wave blaster).
It sounds like you were already having an expensive affair with the PC
Sorry to hear that. Seems like you ex had an inclination for technology anyway. Currently, my wife is extremely happy that I completely moved away from PC gaming/PC Server projects at home to PS4 pro(for gaming) and to ARM64 SBC boards like the cheap raspberry Rpi4's 8Gb and Odroid boards as N2/N2Plus and C4, which keep me occupied during my spare time at home and specially during the long winters in East Canada. The expense is much less now once you're are setup with mandatory accessories which are way cheaper than PC ones.
Just some interesting info from manufacturers in Taiwan regarding Cyrix MediaGX/Geode...
They are extremely popular for making video slot machines, popular enough that some small manufacturers are buying recycled circuit boards that contains the version of the Geode/GX chip they need, desolder and test each chip before reusing them.
And they have tested offerings from VIA, when mentioning VIA, the normally polite and timid engineer started to curse out loud about how crazy buggy VIA's CPU are...
Also let's admit it together, many Chinese and Taiwanese railroad locomotives do use the MediaGX as the processor on the control center :3
Why _that_ chip in particular, I wonder?
NeuronalAxon Because it was cheap to be built in in many low budget embedded motherboards for these kind of applications :3
that's insane. Don't they just use microcontrollers for those things? Certainly don't need an x86 to run something like that. Even ARM or MIPS would work and as cheap as Geode if not cheaper. This is the reason you don't bet on products with low life expectancies, the product disappears.
MrTweetyhack notice the video part. You can't really expect that much 2D graphics performance from MCU, and it could do a little bit of 3D effect from time to time as well.
I think mediaGX is just barely enough to do it and cheap enough for good profit.
I had a magnet on my fridge that said something like "Cyrix: Anything else is half fast."
I used Cyrix MII in my first ever computer. Eventually fried it through overclocking, while playing Settlers III. Good old days 😁
shame Cyrix is gone they gave you options and choice for computers that now they are gone you no longer have and that's a tragedy😭
I remember trying to play Sonic the Hedgehog on Windows 98SE. It wouldn't work on Cyrix processors, since it did a CPU check on boot of the game to check the strength of the processor. I ended up downloading an unofficial Cyrix driver that fooled the game into thinking it was an Intel chip. Worked great, but a pain for some games.
I had the same problem with the original release of Final Fantasy VII, it would run to a certain point in the game and crash unless you had the Cyrix Driver, I personally owned the MX200 PR at 160mHz and a Trident64 2d card and Voodoo2 8meg adapter for graphics. LOL, what difference a decade does for our current gaming hardware.
I remember the Pentium CPU check in games now that you bring it up. I never heard about the driver trick though. What the Cyrix chip could run it did run fast. Still, I always felt like I only had a souped up 486 when I was using it.
+Paul Frederick The problem appeared to be the worst in Windows 95, at least pre-OSR2! (and probably earlier as well) Because Windows 95 reportedly, will report 486 or the like!
+RJARRRPCGP when I used that chip I was running Windows 95 too. Then I got a genuine Pentium 200 MMX. I also started running Linux too.
It was almost certainly something of this ilk. Many games were unwisely coded to identify whether or not it was running on a Pentium, and would just outright refuse to run if it didn't detect. Obviously this was intended to prevent the game from running really badly on underspecced 486s, but often locked out other perfectly valid non-Intel CPUs
I seem to recall G-Police requiring an updated launcher to identify the Cyrix correctly, at which point it would start the game and run reasonably well.
I was so hammered in the '90's that i'd forgotten all about Cyrix, even though I owned 2 of them.
Shit a brick.....are you saying the '90s were real? I thought it was a dream. Can I F9 and go back for another crack at the totty I missed?
I know the feeling. I've two ex-wives I don't remember meeting.
I used to so look forward to getting the "Computer Shopper" multi hundred paged magazine and spooging over all the new tech where I learned about cyrix and stuff. Computer Shopper out shined all the other mags even with it's phone book paper pages.
That was some nerd porn back in the day. It's what ultimately led me to build my own system, as I'm sure many here :)
I agree, I had stacks of "Computer Shopper" magazines and would sift through EVERY page, just like some kid who's face would be pressed against the glass outside a candy store.
+@Umh Chud - "Alice and Bill" tech section
Ahhh. Those were the days. 56k modem ads. "Budget" systems for under $2,000. $4000.00 laptops. Articles claiming Dell and Gateway would never sell a sub-$1000 desktop. CRT monitor ads. 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier OEMs. Yes, those were the days.
Also....
"Hacking" AT modem commands for faster speed.
Usenet
BBS
"Shotgunning" modems
Making fun of people who used AOL
Overclocking that had real world uses, not just bragging rights.
You could have a desktop case in any color as long as it was beige.
+@@n3Cr0ManCeD - Trident video cards, ISA, 512K, to handle Silent Service II.
I use to sell Cyrix processors when I built an sold low-cost PCs. Good times during the K5 and Cyrix days.
my 2nd PC was a Cyrix P166+ and i loved it. All my friends' parents had bought them "real quality" from intel, but could only afford 486's and i was way ahead.
Ah, those were the days ...
Wasn´t cheap. Remember for $300 a Celeron.. worked pretty well.
Excellent video. Took me back to my teenage years :) I remember the Cyrix Chips well. Also love the end music :)
+Retr0Rewind - Teenage years? Hell - it took me back to my early 30s. :-)
Terminal Velocity, Fury3, and Hellbender were all really great flying shoot-em-up games.
so in a way we have cyrix to thank for the intel celeron, and every budget PC component since.
No celeron = no affordable computers...
Not everyone had $1800 to buy a top computer...
Even the aptiva from IBM (Which also didn´t have super CPUs) could cost even $3000.
And that's not counting inflation. Closer to 10k now.
Intel celery*
My second PC had a Cyrix 233 chip ( big upgrade from my previous 486 DX33 ! ). Back then they were loads cheaper than Intel chips, and still worked pretty well
Due to a $200 difference in price, Cyrix was the math co-processor I chose in the mid 90's over Intel. Competition is something Intel hasn't had enough of since the 90's until now. Just yesterday I completed my first AMD build ever, using a Rysen 5 1600. This processor was the same price as the i5 it replaced and challenges any mid range i7 in performance. The ball is your court Intel.
Thank you for making this video. I had never heard of Cyrix and I ran across a Cyrix MII 366gp in my Socket 7 Amptron PM-585LMR family motherboard I was using to replace my 1993 Canon's i486's system with. Had to look it up for it's history and I was pleasantly surprised to find this.
Rather than be so pissy about their name (almost) being used in a big-budget movie, they should have embraced it for the free publicity.
My first 486 was a Cyrix dx2-66mhz.. I was upgrading from AMD 286-16mhz... It was like I was standing with the Gods.....
I actually have a computer that has an IBM-branded Cyrix 6x86.
I still have non mx 166L ibm cpu, worked when last used - upgraded to Amd 300 k6 3d now - then programs could use the code on the ibm for additional speed - eg like a variant like 3d now code.
the blue IBM branded heatsink, please don't remove that!
Is it in a clone case, or still have it running in the original branded casing, then you have a collectors item that is good for some collectors and tech freaks.
1997, a logical system for some still underdog...
I still have the blue heatsink, but I think it's in a clone case unfortunately :(
who fucking cares?
Russ rude.
I'm curious to know the trajectory of Macromedia...
You should make a dedicated video on the nature of the x86 licensing. Intel taking many different early companies to court, rulings for Cyrix being able to make CPU's only through IBM. AMD to this day being the only no-strings-attached x86 licence (other then the fact AMD's licence licence can't be transferred). Lot's of scandalous stuff there. I think it would be a good way to transition to why there were so many x86 CPU makers at first, and now only two (and why it will always be two). I don't think a lot of people understand the full history behind it all, even enthusiast, there is a lot to take in, it would be nice having you break it down. It's super interesting.
The same COULD be done for the GPU market, but it's a lot less interesting since licenses/payouts/buyouts/court rulings are not involved. Just the survival of the fittest, either you were purchased by NVidia/AMD, or you simply died by making stupid mistakes and fell behind. Though, if you didn't make a video on Voodoo, it would be worth covering just for that, those cards kinda put true 3D accelerators on the map and in normal people's computers.
Cyberdyne that's not true Nvidia litigated 3dfx out of business them bought the IP Sad
Most I've seen blame 3Dfx's move to an in house fab as the main reason for failure. Production rates were super low. In fact, I've seen no one that directly blamed NVidia, other then the fact their cards finally started to surpass Voodoo. NVidia did purchase most of 3Dfx, but only after they were on the brink of total collapse.
Cyrix was the chips I learned on to build computers back in the day.......was a little sad when they went away....
Good ol Cyrix Indead.
sirflimflam t
I had a Cyrix CPU in an Emachines PC once. Probably better to have just used an abacus to get everything I needed to do done and real playing cards to play solitaire.
Cyrix made dog shit
Couldn't you under clock it a bit to make it more stable.
Pablo: Apropos.
Shambler: Never bothered to tweak your machine to the new CPU spec?, your memory kept on junking out with the wrong ns timing.
Shambler was it the EMachines Etower 366c with the Super Socket 7 Cyrix M II 366 MMX Processor (which had about the same FPU performance of a 233 Mhz MMX Pentium 1) ?
I have one (Etower 366c) but I replaced the CPU with a el cheapo AMD K6-2 @ 350 Mhz instead as it performed much better with PC Games than the Lowly M II.
The other major upgrade was putting a 3Dfx Voodoo 2000 PCI graphics card in it and a beefier power supply rather than using the horrid ATI Rage iic Integrated graphics
Amazing video! I always wondered what happened to Cyrix because I had a PC while at school with one inside it. Thank you for making this video, brings back very happy memories of secondary school
This was a fun video to watch. I've got a little rivalry going on in my retro room right now. I've got AMD, Intel, and Cyrix 486 machines as well as Intel, AMD, and Cyrix 233 rated socket 7 machines. No real practical reason except to throw the benchmark pack at them and see what each one can do.
5:11 486DLC? EA needs to stop time traveling
They must be charged extra moneys for that at the time.
I'm a strange sort of computer nerd. I look back at old computer technology with despair rather than nostalgia, because I remember how painfully slow and unreliable it was compared to newer computers. Old computers aren't like old sports cars where they still offer a uniquely thrilling experience -- they're just old, slow, noisy, dusty, and unforgivably beige.
Yes but if you like the old DOS 6.22 /Win 3.1 era retro games like Red Alert, Syndicate (Wars), Dark Forces, Wing Commander, the Lucasarts SCUMM adventures etc, those old machines are the best way to go about it.I wish I had one up and running now as Windows 10 with Dosbox or Vmware is not quite the same thing. There is something satisfying about getting config.sys and autoexec.bat optimised for the most demanding expanded memory intensive games.
@@davekp6773: I would much rather play one of those old games pre-configured to run on a modern OS by a company like GOG.com instead of bashing my head against the wall trying to get it to work on my own, even using period-correct hardware. I'm an adult now, with adult-sized responsibilities, and if I'm playing a video game at all it's because I need a break from stressful things. I admit I _very_ rarely miss the days of making a table of all the IRQ and DMA settings supported by each of my add-on cards so I can figure out which settings will allow all of my hardware to work correctly, but nowadays if I want to do something like that I can just grab one of my 40+ RC cars and tweak the carburetor on its engine instead. At least troubleshooting analog equipment has immediate and easily-discernible effects, whereas digital equipment doesn't work at all until the settings are all configured just-right.
Watching your channel is like watching 3am infomercials with an added amount of entertainment, easy to fall asleep to, and at the same time fun to watch
I remember playing Quake II on my Pentium MMX 233Mhz with a 16MB Voodoo Banshee card.
Ahh... Those days, when Byte Magazine was the highlight of the month, reading Chaos Manor (The great (late) Dr Jerry Pournelle's column).
I built my very first PC back in 1996 with a Cyrix 166+ and some cheap VIA based mainboard from AOpen. As a poor student I took great pleasure in having 32 MB of RAM and 3.2 GB HD. Double of what my co-students had in their pre-built machines. It was the same year I first heard about Linux. Man, I'm getting old :-/
In 1991, our first PC was 386, we bought Ultima 7 with it. We immediately went back to Micro Center and bought a sound card and math co-processor.
I'm about 75% sure it was a Cyrix. But i was 9 and that was 30 years ago, so i could be mistaken. But that started my family on building our own computers. Cyrix is a name i hadn't heard it years. It takes me back.
I loved the Cyrix 486 processors, and the badass heatsinks.
What a great video - thank you!
I remember reading all sorts of magazines in the 90s and early 2000s about cyrix and i also remember the idt winchip which i remember used to have its main advertising pitch about having the most transistors on a cpu (as opposed to touting performance awards)
OMG, the Cyrix 486 DX2 66 was my 1st CPU in my 1st PC in 1991.
So many memories ^^
My first Windows PC was an Emachines 366e I bought in 1999 for $399 (with a 2-year Compuserve agreement) powered by a Cyrix MII 250 (overclocked I believe, which explains some of the minor instability I experienced. I did have a 386 [I think] in 1995 that was given to me by a neighbor/friend when I was a teenager, but since it only had 1.44" and 5.75" floppy drives and DOS, I didn't really appreciate what I had and didn't know that I could upgrade it with a hard drive, so I left it out by the dumpster in 1996 for another neighbor to take and instead used a Brother word processor to do my homework in highschool- lol). I upgraded my Emachines in 2001 with an AMD K6-II 3DNow 400MHz for $25 purchased on Ebay, and I thought that was a major boost in performance compared to what I had been previously using. I had to set the dip switches (remember those) to a 2x multiplier which the K6-2 interpreted as an x6 multiplier and the bus at 66MHz for stability (probably because I was using 66MHz SDRAM). Two years later, I built my first self-assembled computer with a 1.7GHz Celeron P4, and that thing was screaming fast in comparison to the K6-2.
Killed off by national semiconductor having shitty fabs.
Yep, I remind that when they got cyrix cpu on their 0.25µ process, the voltage didn't get down.
Then they talked about getting quickly to 0.18µ, and as experts explain, that only meant that their actual process was crap.
Some might say the end came earlier, around the time Jerry Rogers departed. Some might say. I am merely reporting the controversy.
When I saw a friend 's Cyrix processor, I recall thinking "That's what you get for buying a pre-built kmart PC". I would visit my friend's houses with my Monster 3D II, plugging it into their computer, and showing them what they were missing out on. Same person with the Cyrix then goes out and buys a Banshee ... and again, I roll my eyes. Cyrix was a valid option for budget buyers who knew what they were doing, sure, but just so many people got suckered into the marketing and ended up with a gaming dud, not realizing the difference.
my first build as a kid was an m2 233. I was STOKED because i ordered it through a magazine and it was just called cyrix 233 or something... When i got it i saw it was the m2 and thought to myself "it's like a pentium 2!! What a deal!" Hahaha, i didn't really play games but every time i did try and play one the performance was horrible unless it was an old dos game in 320x240. At one point i blew the chip up overclocking it and had to fall back on a p133, i was amazed that games actually played a bit better on this 1/2 clocked processor. Along with things like encoding mp3's... they were not much slower on the old pentium. Pretty much the only thing that was faster on the cyrix was certain benchmarks that i overly excited my young self on...
A big thunbs up for that little feature of the "secret life of the machines" - what a fantastic and timeless show that was!
Been listening to a bunch of these super fascinating old computer mini-documentaries while working on some artwork. Totally snapped me out of my zone hearing Maine. I live there! I go to school in one of the cities one of their plants was in! Way past cool!
Interesting fact: the M1 processor was so ahead of his time that is currently used in the 2021 MacBook line
i fucking hate children
@@wiigirl09 interesdasting
When I went off to college in 1996, I had a PC built for me using graduation gift money and other earnings. It was a 6x86. I do remember plenty of evenings of getting a BSOD on Win95 from the chip overheating, and even had a couple times where I yanked it out to cool down faster to get back into some dorm LAN Quake battles. Yes, it was faster yank it out of the socket and case than to let it cool down on its own!
should have cooled it thermoelectrically.
@@jessfucket Definitely. Over winter break the guys who built it gave me a bigger heat sink and put some heat paste on it as well. Didn't have too many issues after that.
My dad had one of these. I actually remember that we booted a pirated copy of Quake on his rig, only to be disappointed by the Cyrix's lackluster performance. Later on he got the pentium. Oh, the 90s... How I miss that decade.
My first computer I bought as an adult had one of these cpus. I had a 386 as a teen but bought one of these to play baldur's gate games in 1999. Then 3& games. I had a cyrix m2 200mhz that I clocked to 333mhz and ran with a voodoo 3 then a 5 5500. The cpu was the limiting factor for 3d games as even adding a soundbalster live card which did hardware sound processing, gave me a 10+ fPS boost.
I started having issues running newer games and upgraded to a p3 650mhz cm with a GeForce 3. Both my cpu and gfx card companies were no longer in business :(
Man! I had not heard the name Cyrix in almost 2 decades. When I graduated college in 1992, I asked all my family members AND in-laws to collect all the money which they planned on spending for my graduation presents, and buy me a 386SX CPU and a motherboard for it, so I could upgrade my PC at that time (was Intel at that time, but I have been using AMD exclusively since mid-1990's).
On the "greater than 13 FPS" part, it was widely known among video game developers at the time that the human eye/brain perceives motion starting at 14 FPS. So many games would actually lock themselves to 14 FPS, since variable frame rates are much more difficult to program, especially before the times of readily adaptable game engines (often you would program a new game from scratch, or carry very small bits of code between projects).
I have no idea where the 14 FPS number originated, or if it is backed up by real science.
Wolfenstein, Doom, Heretic, Hexon, Duke Nukem & Quake all very similar, popular games for the PC during the mid 90’s. Wolfenstein & Doom have all had a new lick of paint and released on the PS4, Xbox One & PC. I’ve even got Doom VFR on the PSVR and I wonder what 14yr old me would think of playing Doom VFR after only playing the SNES version of DOOM? I remember playing Doom 2 on the PC and being blown away by the graphics so playing Doom in virtual reality would probably be like a dream where I’m living on one of the Martian moons Phobos or Demos fighting demons & Hell Knights for real. But I always wondered what happened to Quake as it was popular meant to have better graphics than Doom but just disappeared and I forgot about it until this video. Doom went on to have a version on the N64, Doom 64 which I got and thought looked great but as impressive as the version I got for the original Xbox a few years later and we know about the 2 newer games for the PS4 & Xbox One (plus the one especially for the PSVR which is a new game on it’s own)
I made and sold a lot of Cyrix based systems. If the user just wanted to do basic things like browse the early Internet and type some documents, that was all they needed. And they could be quite a bit less than a similar Intel system. And to be honest, I never built an Intel system for myself, finding AMD was as good or better for the same price by the mid-1990s. The last Intel I made for myself was my 80486-50 in 1992.
Following the lineage of Cyrix is fun. Cyrix was born from Ex-TI employees. Cyrix not having its own plant, partnered with TI for manufacturing. Legal issues caused Cyrix to switch to IBM manufacturing which ultimately cost them royalties and a cross-license by allowing IBM to make its own clones of Cyrix processors which they used in their own products. NSD, TI's leading competitor at the time, buys (and merges with) Cyrix and ultimately shutters the IBM deal. NSD sells the Cyrix division to VIA (man the memories) and then ultimately (2011) NSD is acquired by TI as an independently operated child corporation.
I think the biggest mistake Cyrix made was selling to NSD, they didn't need NSD's Cross-License agreements with Intel to win against Intel in court, they had already done it twice. All the NSD purchase did was add bloat to their org and bring in a semiconductor manufacturer that thought they could do it better. If Cyrix could have weathered the storm a bit longer, an acquisition by (or of) VIA would have made a lot better sense and could have made Cyrix/VIA a real contender in the x86 competitor market that we might still see today, especially had VIAs other deals like the acquisition of Centaur and the S3 venture. Instead VIA has fallen into moderate obscurity, still producing northbridge chipsets for both Intel and AMD processors among other things. I think had they merged with Cyrix instead of NSD, the world of the microprocessor would be much different today.
My first ibm clone pc in 1993 (or early 94) had a Cyrix 486 DLC-40 with 4mb ram, 2x cdrom dos/win3.1, soundblaster, and svga graphics. A couple months later I swapped the cpu for an intel 486 dx4 100 and added 4mb more of ram to make 8mb.
Fun times.
I love the 2000+ model year cars in the shot look great for 1987...lol :P good vid.
I remember buying a Cyrix DX2-50 processor from someone at college, upgrading from my 386 SX33
4:50 Heh, that advertisement has "r eally" bad text arrangement across the fold.
I remember in 1999, i used to go to a friends house and spend loads of my time playing with them on their computers.. one day i was given a p3 450 with a riva tnt2 16mb, 32 megs of ram and a 10gb hdd. one of my m8s who lived there bought it off my other m8 who worked at compaq. no way was it above board haha.. I thank them for getting me my own computer as it helped me learn a lot.
magic carpet and big red racing...wow so much nostalgia
Had a Cyrix MII in my Win98 Packard Bell. Love it.
If I remember correctly, I never bought a Pentium. In those days I had Cyrix chips, until at some point AMD became my processor of choice -- it was the K2, I think. Since then, I got my long time desk computer for home at a Ham Fest (looking for yet some more measuring instruments) and instead bought the PC. It happened to be built around Intel chips. At about the same time, I was too busy at work to manage with my pocket calculator, so I bought another fully assembled PC for work use. That one was built around AMD cpu. As it happens, it came to my home upon my retirement and is still on my home lab bench, as it contains some non-transferable programs that I need every now and then. Otherwise, the old Ham fest purchase concked earlier this year. Its replacement is one with a solid state ROM hard disk, quite fast with again an AMD cpu. It is my present work horse, with unfortunately many of my dear programs still missing.
I put a Cyrix 386 main board and processor on my computer when I upgraded my old 286 system. We had some good times together.
I still have one of their CPU's mounted on a painting frame with other legacy processors.
I still have a maxed out Cyrix 486 PC. It was upgraded fully and it did play Quake at 21fps. It does have a diamond multimedia ISA graphic extention card though.
My first PC build, back in 1996. Cyrix 6x86 P166+. Great chip back then. ❤️
I remember when my brother and I were working for ATI someone gave us a 5 year old PC with a CPU that said Cyrix. I said "I've never heard about that one." and my brother's response was "Well forget it, that company is gone." 😅
the first PC i'd built had a cyrix MX 233mhz. this is a throwback
I'm still amazed at how all companies were able to use the exact same socket. You could buy a motherboard, and then decide from which manufacturer to buy the CPU.
I love the idea of third parties producing faster CPUs for an older socket, as an upgrade path, so the customer wouldn't need to buy a whole new motherboard just to get a more modern CPU.
I actually am amazed by the reverse - That AMD was able to survive after they suddenly and unexpectedly needed their own chipset, socket and motherboard designs and for companies to get onboard with making boards that were NOT compatible with Intel. The Super Socket 7 was the transition point and luckily it allowed at least older Intel CPUs to still work, giving AMD a decent stopgap.
@@DracoDan2 I'm not that surprised that AMD could adapt. They had experience reverse-engineering chipsets, and if they didn't build their own alternative, they could have probably gotten one from VIA, or many others. Since they already had the socket 7 licence, it probably wasn't that hard to bump the front-side bus an extra 50%. And by "not-hard" I mean relatively. At the time AMD had their own fabs, so they had experts at every level to figure it out.
@@andychow5509 That's not exactly accurate though, they didn't create that bus (EV6), they licensed the technology from DEC who had created it for their Alpha CPU line (before they mistakenly sold out to Compaq). They also did create the first chipset, the AMD 750 before getting help from VIA and their KX/KT133 chipsets.
That's probably one of the reasons why now Intel keeps changing sockets as you change your clothes. Not that anyone would try to make an Intel Core clone these days, but it probably has a paranoia component as well, to be on the safe side. And it's also not that AMD is totally innocent, in spite of its long-lived sockets in recent years. Remember the socket 939 fiasco circa 2010, which left many AMD users fuming?
I literally sent cash money in the mail to cyrix to upgrade my 386 20mhz to 486 33mhz for $120.66. And they found it and shipped it to me after a phone call of course. lol. Love the 90's!
indeed amazing times not processor related but i recall spending hours on the phone with customer support to get a game up(don't recall the title) and running on my weak system. im pretty sure the guy know it wouldn't run on my system from the start but he spent at least 3 hours on the phone trying to walk through every fix he could think of to make it work! something like that would not happen today.
kizonthekeys customer service jobs almost always have a metric that measures productivity. His was probably phone time. He actually got an entire days work done by talking to one person: you!
I miss the old customer service of the 90's: my best experience was with DR Solomon (anti virus)
During my studies, I came across a bug in DR Solomon on a P90 (HP) - when DR Solomon and HP Utilities ran at the same time (on Windows 3.11), DR Solomon would crash. So, I phoned our local customer service number (in Denmark) around 15:00-16:00 and was asked when, I normally leave in the morning. I replied about 7:00. "We'll send someone with an upgrade before that". At around 6:45-7:00 there was a knock on the door. Outside, there was a guy with a new set of disks (3.5") and a BIG apology for my inconvenience. Coming home from school that day, I upgraded - and it worked.
Henrik B Sørensen fantastic!
@@hagalazmultiverze3411 I made a lot of money removing viruses with Dr Solomon, remember that 3.5 floppy drive boot disk Solomon had so you could scan the HDD and remove the virus.?
Man, I can remember absolutely chomping at the bit in wait for my Cyrix Cx486DX2v66 chip to be delivered to me at work. I ordered it because I was tired of my boss beating me at Doom (on breaks) with his "faster" machine. I only had the SX25 while he was using the latest DX66. You wouldn't think it would make all that much difference, but it did back then. Those few extra mHz made all the world better. Then a few months later he got the Pentium...
,🤭😁
What happened then?
The war...it never ends
@@pixphi His boss lost, and due to being a sore loser, fired him for playing games at work.
man, it is more than twice the raw speed and it comes with a co processor... one would expect it to be twice as fast...
There's a certain meta/irony in watching this nostalgia video *5 years* after it was released.
Same here: the YT algorithm put in my feed this week
Same here
While reading this comment 5 months after
Golden words are said at the end of the video. I have the same feelings for Celeron's. Yes - they were cheap and "stupid" processors, but it was thanks to them that many people even had a personal computer at home. The games went slowly, but people still played and rejoiced.
Thanks for the video, it was interesting!
I distinctly remember a celeron label on our first home pc.
So true, I bought a used computer from a high school friend that was a Celeron and it worked for everything I needed at the time. I upgraded from the family Pentium 133mhz to a personal Celeron 350mhz and it was a night and day difference for me.
The Celeron 300A with an Abit BH6 mobo is one one my sweetest memories
Back then we called Celerons the "Lentium" a word play between "Lento" (slow in Portuguese) and Pentium.
The 90s seems like this weird dream. It's hard to believe I was part of it.
Lord Sidius the 80s didn’t gave us Space Jam,
The thing I'm disappointed in myself for is not getting into more programming in the 90's as a teenager. I was too much into building a PC and browsing the net.
Gabriele Riva, the 80s gave your the Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi. Michael Jackson Thriller and Bad, Tears for Fears, and many great pop songs (90s had pop but it got burried by grunge rock before that got buried by late 90s hip-hop) the Commodore 64, the IBM Compatible PC, and the NES.
That’ll be the shrooms and heroin
Don't forget Saved by the Bell and Power Rangers!
OH man, I remember the days of the "Is the Sub-$1000 PC Upon Us?" articles. We were such summer children in those days.
Now budget is limitless it seems with graphics cards over that limit...
It's a struggle to build a contemporary gaming PC under that budget these days. Easy enough with used parts, but if you want everything new, you'll have to compromise.
I remember my dad bringing one of the coprocessors home, handing it to me, and saying, "Put it in". I was like 9.
putting in processors in those ages was very tough. for a 9 y.o it must had been impossible.
Putting in shouldn't be difficult lol, configuring to work might be a challenge tho
“Starting quake”
Your dad: *literally cascade resonance scientist*
When i was 16 (in 1995) i started working in a small business that assembled PCs, server and installed network and isdn hardware and cables.
One day a customer showed up and ordered the cheapest PC we could build. Cyrix 486, Shuttle mainboard, some noname ram and granpa' finest cookies as harddrive.
I spent hours trying to find timings and voltages that all components could agree on.
It was the day i learned "jumper kung-fu".
23 years... damn...
Back in the day where there still was noname RAM with which you totally could eff up the whole rig's stability if you put more than just one into it...
In the same year I built myself a 486 PC, the mainboard of which had 45 jumpers.
I worked for Cyrix. One of my favorite jobs. I was in IT rather than Engineering, but still, it felt like we were fighting the good fight and doing something important.
Yeah, getting kids so disappointed with Quake performance that they shot themselves. Or their parents. We need more space on this planet. Overpopulation, etc.
Give yourself a pat on the back.
I played quake on a Cyrix without shooting myself, I did as all the others i knew and bought a Voodoo-card which greatly increased the speed no matter what CPU you had...
You Sir, are a better man than me.What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
.I'm writing this from a hell populated by the legions of innocents who used the lords name in vain while contemplating the performance of their Cyrix chip in Doom.
Its hot down here. Yes, they use Cyrix down here too.
Again, I was in a support role, not engineering. I cannot tell you why Cyrix didn't focus on floating-point performance (the key to Quake). I can tell you that many of us played Quake (my handle comes from there) on Cyrix chips we got at cost, so I understand the frustration. The Good Fight was to keep competition going. Consumers lose when there is a monopoly. Monopoly means less innovation, higher prices and less choice. No matter whose chip you ran, Cyrix helped you get the best at the lowest price. Meanwhile, I prefer not to comment on other aspects in the above video, especially on Mr. Swent's arrival and what we felt that meant. But the history video could have ended at that point with only a short summation.
I'm joshing, mate. Yes its a great story (true story) but a lot of people were miffed when the system was such a disappointment, after all the hype.
The problem is, and its just as true today, the whole truth isn't told. That it was so weak in some important games should have been made clear.
That's all. Mom and Pop are not gonna buy Johnny another PC when he tells them the one they thought would make him so happy, didn't.
Just read the comments below. People were pissed off. I know it was cheaper but it doesn't matter. People were misled.
I would never ever have touched a Cyrix, Via or a Nehemiah. But by then everybody knew their reputation.
But they were exciting times.(if you didn't get burned).
Back in the days when overclocking could mean a 50% increase in power!
I remember getting a Cyrix P200 (pr200?) and clocking that up to 333. Then upgrading to an AMD on that same motherboard and going to 400mhz!
I think my 3570k with ~30% increase (3.4 -> 4.4) still holds up pretty well.
I can remember getting an occasional AMD K5-75 to clock at K5-PR166 levels (but only some of the VERY early production, most were lucky to hit K5-100 levels).
Its also the day when you could now encode mp3s faster than they would play. in the 120MHz age it took longer than the song time to encode.
it became popular in 1998 when all the PC mags started to boost about it on the pentium 2 celeron.... it was very technical though and nobody had fancy Cpu coolers then they were all OEM so pretty risky
A lot of effort went into that video. Well done!
A lot of video went into that effort more like. One can only polish a turd so much. We use PCs to play games. The Cyrix couldn't. Therefore it was, is - and always will be, shit.
Game over.
Yes it is an entertaining video, but it it rambles on a bit at times and the viewer can be still digesting the information when the next hopper load of facts and figures is poured into their brain.
My video = Cyrix promised a 747 but delivered a paper plane. 2 pictures, A 747 and a child holding a basic paper dart. Big round of applause. I bow, smiling graciously and a lot of resources burned while watching his video are saved. All very dull but preventing Global warming is dull.
Who's this "we", Kemosabe? Got a mouse in your pocket?
Always. And a joystick, Mister Ed..
Many thanks to author.
Great video. So much nostalgia in this.. shopping the pc part price list and upgrading my 486DX.. man...how time flys
truth. i remember the PC Magazine covers that were like 200MHZ?! like we had just discovered a cure for cancer.. hehe
same here. i miss drooling over pcmag and tigerdirect magazines late into the night. i miss the CompUSA flyers that would come every weekend in the newspaper. i miss the demo disks that used to come with PC gaming magazines...just the thrill of playing a few minutes of a new game ran by YOUR computer was better than crack.
Talk about nostalgia. I recently went through old stuff and found a Feb 1997 PC Magazine, and a Maxell DC-6250 1/4" "data cartridge" (=backup tape), among many other things. Fun memories. I happened to open the magazine to an article that starts out "I finally decided to get a new modem....."
I only had a 486sx due to being a kid however I deliberately chose the SX over an AMD as I couldn't bare to have a PC that didn't have an Intel processor. Kids who had AMD's got laughed at in my school, if you had a Cyrix you were pond life, nobody would even speak to you.
In an alternate universe, it's AMD vs Cyrix... in another, it's Intel vs Cyrix... in this, it's AMD vs Intel
In another All of Em are competing In another There is a Monopoly of Processors That can be the one of the 3
Why not Intel vs AMD vs Cyrix?
There can be only one.. but there's always 2
And GPU competition back then were Voodoo vs NVIDIA vs Radeon vs Matrox
@@aaadj2744 ...vs Tseng vs ELSA vs Cirrus Logic vs Hercules vs 3DLabs vs Trident vs Diamond vs V7 vs Orchid...
First PC I built completely from scratch had a Cyrix CPU as it's all I could afford at the time and had the biggest bang for the buck...Brings a nostalgic tear to the eye...Cue digital lighter...
Yeah, they weren't much, but building them yourself had a certain level of pride. It took me six months to build my own. I didn't have much money, so I would buy a part or two at a time each month until one was built. :) Good times. There's something I miss about those slower, more limited systems and graphics back then.
Please adjust your LEd numbering on the case to 200 whenthe computer ran to 133, to everybody said "WOOW"
Emperor Of The Known Universe same here mate!
Same same. It was a crap PC, but man I was I ever proud of that thing. Just the fact I could put something like that together with my own hands and actually have it boot up and run opened up a whole new world.
i *still* bought the parts piece by piece over 6 months just last year >.>
Awesome Video, but such a sad story. Intel was price gouging their Pentiums (a 166 in 1995-6 could cost you $500) and getting away with it before the 6x86 came along and forced them to drop prices fast. For a while Cyrix was the little company that could. Had Cyrix made their first 6x86's run cool with a fast floating point unit for Quake and 3D gaming they might have made fast fans with gamers instead of getting a bad reputation. But I remember a lot of businesses and schools here in Texas used computers with later lower voltage Cyrix MX and MII CPU's. For office, school work and Non-3D gaming Cyrix CPU's were a good bargain and kept a lot of local "Mom & Pop" OEM computer stores in business. I don't think Quake alone killed Cyrix. It was the combined attack from Intel's Celeron and AMD's K6 family (which were faster and better CPU's for Socket 7) that really did Cyrix in. They couldn't keep up with Intel's and AMD's rapid pace of development and then got gutted. Keep up the awesome work on your videos!
The Celeron was literally a Pentium with a castrated cache, created by Intel marketing not engineering. It still is.
I agree the early Celerons and some later ones were junk chips. But the Celeron 300a (not 300) got a great reputation in the gamer community then for being easy to overclock to 400-450 mhz with a good heatsink. And that you could easily upgrade to a "real" Pentium II when you got the cash or when prices dropped was a nice bonus.
The first computer that I ever owned personally (i.e. not shared with family members) had a Cyrix 133 CPU. Embarrassingly, I always thought it was pronounced "Sear-ix" until I was corrected one day. That day is today.
I still pronounce it that way.
It is Sear-ex.
Mine too. Actually it was a 120, but I bumped the FSB up from 60 to 66 for that extra little bit of oomph ;)
Just depends. The voice also pronounces "them" as "vem". But, yeah, I pronounced it as "Si' riks", too.
Given he mispronounced Jalapeno, I wouldn't really use this as a guide on how to pronounce the company's name. Especially one that was based in Texas.
I remembered that time, I never buy a Cyrix chip but the computer hardware was exciting. New hardware came out every week like 3DFX, Sound cards. Great times ;)
The magazines you had to get to buy parts for your computer. Good times..
Now in 2019 with several security flaws around branch prediction, makes you wonder if Cyrix had the right idea all along to turn it off
But it makes benchmarks higher, and that's the end all-be all to consumers. Consumers don't always know what they need, and if the marketeers aren't principled enough to inform the consumer, the market is essentially SOL.
without branch prediction, you end up in the performance area of the first intel atom.
@SteelRodent That is not true at all, from what I could tell from the guidance given to developers at the time. All you need is the ability to have some control over instruction execution, which is trivial with JS on the web, and you can sometimes skip software access checks (like JS array index checks) and try and scrape information you shouldn't have from the process memory (like information from other sites), so browsers had to much more carefully keep information out of the site's process.
@@SimonBuchanNz Trivial? TRIVIAL? LMFAO!
@@spudhead169 I believe you misread me: "have some control over instruction execution" is the trivial thing, and having that and to be in the same process as some secret data is enough for an attack to be plausible.
The problem with assuming that because the attack itself may be very difficult that you don't need to worry about it, is that only one person needs to figure something out and share it for everyone to have access to everyone's secrets, and because the vector is so widespread it was a huge deal.
You should do a similar video about 3dfx and the voodoo card.
man you brought back sweet memories.
I had the 5500 model, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5
voodoo, man i havent heard that in a long time.
Videoman2000 check out LGR Tech Tales. He does a great video on 3dfx and Voodoo.
+MR cool man, what OS are using? Linux?
Remember playing Blood 2?! ;D
www.bundlestars.com/en/game/blood-ii-the-chosen-and-expansion
+MR That was one helluva game, along with System Shock 2 and Dues Ex,
www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/fps-heroes-bundle
I still remember its music, esp. this one: ua-cam.com/video/RyD4r4AR6Xo/v-deo.htmlm
Hello, I really liked the video many thanks for doing it. However I find some minor imprecise information on Cyrix architecture.
Around 17:00 you said that “whilst developing quake John Carmak realized that fpu and integer operation used different part of Pentium core and could be effectively overlapped. This nearly double the speed of fpu intensive game code, however on Cyrix processor the operation didn’t overlap”. This statement was a bit confusing for me so I did some research on the topic. Cyrix is capable of overlapping integer and floating point operation together, in fact was one of the selling point of the advantages of a Cyrix architecture over the Pentium. It is written on the 6x86 manual (datasheets.chipdb.org/Cyrix/M1/6x86/M1-1.PDF). The Pentium core in fact is not able to do that unless the floating point operation is a division. Division is and expensive operation and takes up to 39 cycles on a Pentium to be completed, but Michal Abrash ( this is the engineer responsible for Penitum optimisation in ID software, not Carmack) find out that in the specific case of the division you could pipe up 39 single cycle integer instruction while and division is in executing making it virtually a 1 cycle operation during projection phase. It uses also some extra care to optimise to some degree dot product and matrix multiplication. All of this is very well documented and you can find all the tricks used in Abrash’s book , chapter Floating-Point for Real-Time 3-D (www.drdobbs.com/parallel/graphics-programming-black-book/184404919 ).
This optimisation you mentioned in the video was adding a feature that the Pentium lacked and the Cyrix had naturally by not using any tricks. What killed the Cyrix in floating point execution was the lack of pipelining for floating point operation. This massively reduce the throughput especially when you have a long sequence of floating point operation and you have no integer to overlap, like for example in a matrix multiplication. Without a pipelining the cpu have to wait the whole operation to be completed before issuing another, so for example if a multiplication takes 3 cycle you get a multiplication every 3 cycle. With pipelining the cpu can issue another instruction as soon as the current one left the current stage, so in the cpu have still to wait 3 cycle for the first operation to be completed, but all the susequent ones will be completed whitin a cycle of distance. On top of that Cyrix multiplication and Addition takes double cycles than pentium to complete ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87).
Concluding the Pentium-specific optimisation helped quake go an extra mile, but ultimately the Pentium had a very high floating point throughput even without specific optimisation compared to Cyrix.
Sorry I wrote a long comment but I think it's important to clarify since quake vs Cyrix is kinda the whole point of the video.
This comment needs to be pinned. I also remember the problem being not just Quake, but most games! Thanks for the info!
Very good comment. Thanks!
Most researched comment EVER! Awesome info, thank you.
For some reason, I understood approximately none of what you said but really enjoyed reading it, fair play on the research and knowledge sharing side of things though, top stuff.
You've gone above and beyond.
@Andy Wheale Agreed.
I played WoW at 10 - 14 fps when I was younger on my eMachine and had no problem with it. I was just happy to be playing WoW lol!
Did you play 18 h a day and you poop in a can?
@@louistournas120 Come on now, that was uncalled for.
Chill out, dickwad.
And ate hot pockets
@@nonegone7170 What you mean? Many of us did. Some of us still do.
@@nonegone7170 simp
1:17 The 5x86 lacked branch prediction, meaning that it was immune to Spectre. LOOKS LIKE THEY WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG.
lol! Nice catch.
+SteelSkin667:
I prefer to have branch prediction in my CPU.
If you are doing something important with your PC, then you should have the option to disable that CPU feature.
True but it utterly brutalizes performance
iluminati
@ they knew it long before it happen, as always...what?
Need more clips from "Secret life of machines", maybe commentary eps? I've always loved that show
Secret life of machines. Loved that theme song~! Also the show was very good too.
yeah why was that clip even in there? What did that show have to do with Cyrix?
This was my first PC in 1996:
* Cyrix 6x86 P166
* 16MB RAM
* 2GB HDD
* 16x CD-ROM drive
* Aztech audio card (sound blaster compatible)
* 4MB ATI 3D video card with MPEG hardware decoder
* 15" crt monitor with integrated speakers
* PS/2 keyboard & PS/2 mouse
* Windows 95 OSR2 OEM
Oh man this takes me back... my first PC was a MITAC brand , 486 DX/2 66Mhz, 8mb of ram it came with OS/2 WARP (we switched to win 95 later) ...it ran doom well.
My next PC had the legendary Pentium 166mhz with MMX of course :) I got it to play MDK lol
My first PC in 1988. IBM PS/2 50Z
Intel 80286, 10Mhz
4MB RAM
30MB HDD
IBM 8512 Color monitor 14" VGA resolution
Integrated VGA Display adapter
IBM PC DOS Versions 3.30
IBM 101 Keyboard
3.5 1.44Mb floppy drive
NO Mouse was needed
@@josephtremblant2173 jesus that was before Charlemagne
C64 then a sx386-25. They were exciting days in IT. So bored now.
That is almost identical to the first pc I ever got (family pc). It was made by time computers and was absolute garbage 😆 I always listed for a pentium - especially the mmx ones.
I remember it was actually clocked at 133mhz but was supposed to perform like a 166. In fact for games I can remember my friends having a much better experience on a pentium 120.
Still, I did have a mighty good time with that PC. Duke Nukem 3D. Quake 1 etc.
Intel introduced "Branch Prediction", and now that's a security risk due to Spectre bugs! So we should have stayed with our dear Cyrix CPUs ;-)
But now we have ryzen
Yeah, I prefer ryzen.
How stupid does Cyrix think we are?! Everyone knows that the human eye can't see past 13 FPS!
Get better glasses dood
24
I thought it was like 20-30 fps
@@tomfly3155 nah i can see a difference between 30/60/120 fps
@@linkthehero1234 ya, me too. But scientists bastards say it's more than 30, but less than like 150
Only time I ever bought a Cyrix chip was in 2000 when Intel introduced its "ID number" anti-piracy measure for the Pentium III. I thought I was being such a consumer privacy activist by boycotting Intel.
Oh how naive we were back then.
I still remember No TCPA, was quite a thing in the early 2000s.
I sold computers around the time they had their P200 and P233 models. It was really easy to sell to customers. "It's just as fast but cheaper"... that worked always...
And I was one of many who learned the hard way that you get what you pay for.
@Luca Rossi Had a new system built in 1998. Went with a Cyrix M2 because it was cheaper and it burned up within 45 days.
Actually the AMD's were the fastest back then at 200
@@anonymousinc6330 this could have been avoided by using a good cooler on that microprocessor, which turns out to become pretty hot when operating. However, i know some people who collect old processors. How about designing a motherboard which can hold say about 16 processors in 1 time. Thats a good idea, but the cooling still is neccasary on the processors. They get hot when operationg. The cooling prevents the burn up
@@WimHamhuis This one had good cooling. It was just a POS from the word go. Cyrix has gone the way of the dodo for a reason.
Cyrix. That's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
Thank Christ.
I had a Cyrix CPU as a child, I loved it!!!
@@ChristopherSibert the one and only I ever had was very short-lived. Needless to say, I was not impressed.
I haven't gone by that name since, oh before you were born.
ever heard of Semiconductor ?
My modem is running an AMD Geode, I didn't know it was a Cyrix.
It just occurred to me how powerful it would be to download every video on your channel, rip them to VHS tapes, and time travel with them back to 1990 Silicon Valley. Could you even imagine?
Just bring a Ryzen 9 7950x and a x670 MB, a i9 12900k and z690 mb, a WD Gen 4 4tb m.2 a RX6900XT a rtx4090. Drop them off at their respective manufacturers and go back to present times to see how much you disrupted the progression of tech. Oh and don't forget a Displayport to vga adaptor... Lol
@@scottcol23 lmao less accessible on my budget, but that would certainly be an effective strategy.
@@scottcol23 Wont come back. Have to stay to buy Amazon, Apple around the early 2000s, Bitcoin in the late 2000s, short the banks in 2008 and GME in the 2020s.... then I can tell Bro Musk : Feck orf, imma paying 45b for Twitter and imma blocking your account.
@@keithw4920 Those are worthy pit stops to make lol I was mining bitcoin in 2012 when the price of one coin was about $18. at the time I had 3 Radeon HD 5770's and was getting one BTC every 3 days... Man do I wish I had just known to keep those coins...
@@scottcol23 I had my card out in 2009 wanting to buy some of this new fangled blockshit. Didnt go thru because I couldnt understand the white paper much. Might have sold em at 10 bucks or so though, it would still have been a >10000% profit.
I really liked working at Cyrix in Longmont, CO. I especially remember how awesome the break room was, free soda and a espresso machine. How I got a testing technician job with them is I told the truth about my understanding of Windows, from 1 to 10 (one being the least, 10 being the most). I told them that even the most knowledgeable engineer at Microsoft probably couldn't be more then a 9 and there is so much in regards to the development side that I don't know even exists, so I said a 6. They said every other person they interviewed just blurted out a 10, with no explanation as to why they think they know it inside and out. It had to be the best interview I have ever had. Anyway I did well there and really miss the talking to the cool engineers, but left to help Mike Booth make a video game, Nox in Fort Collins (that is another story).
I find it funny that Longmont has a tech background, my stepdad worked at IBM in Longmont.
Cool town now too, now that I'm older. Lots of good microbrews in the city like Left Hand. I kinda miss that town.
I really liked working at Cyrix in Longmont, CO. I especially remember how awesome the break room was, free soda and a espresso machine. How I got a testing technician job with them is I told the truth about my understanding of Windows, from 1 to 10 (one being the least, 10 being the most). I told them that even the most knowledgeable engineer at Microsoft probably couldn't be more then a 9 and there is so much in regards to the development side that I don't know even exists, so I said a 6. They said every other person they interviewed just blurted out a 10, with no explanation as to why they think they know it inside and out. It had to be the best interview I have ever had. Anyway I did well there and really miss the talking to the cool engineers, but left to help Mike Booth make a video game, Nox in Fort Collins (that is another story).