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Cyrix's 'Joshua' announcement
h0rus writes, "One of the guys from Ars went to Cyrix's unveiling of their new x86 chip, the Cyrix III (codenamed "Joshua"), and wrote up a summary of what was announced. The chip looks like a pretty sweet budget/mobile x86 option: 64K L1, 256K L2, dual-pipelined FPU, Socket 370 compatible, and not clock-locked. Maybe Cyrix can redeem their name with this one. "
Saw stuff on this back on VIA's site a while ago...i think they absorbed Cyrix, but is going to continue to market them as Cyrix chips. Overclocking is a plus! The should be decent but hopefully the fight by Untel will no go through against VIA, seeing as how they own Cyrix
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Sounds good... I'd like to see more companies in the processor market. Prices have been artificially high due to lack of competition lately.
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Don't get me wrong here. . . I'm very glad Cyrix is here. As we've learned from AMD, more competition = better products at better prices!
BUT, Cyrix has a habit of over-hyping products that seem to fall flat in the end. I was a 6x86 owner, since it was all I could afford at the time. The Cyrix name has been tarnished by chips with incompatibility and performance issues from the beginning.
Cyrix's typical problem, just like AMD had until the Athlon, was its dismal floating point unit. Intel's fully pipelined FPU made the AMD/Cyrix/Winchips, etc, look really bad, and as such, since the Pentium, they've always been "value" CPUs, and not "performance" CPUs. Now I've yet to see official benchmarks on the VIA Joshua processor, but from people who have seen some of the pre-production chips, it doesn't look too promising.
I'm guessing that this chip will be a decent competitor to the K6 series of CPUs, but maybe that's just wishful thinking - Cyrix CPUs have traditionally had some unusual defects in them, that even later steppings didn't fix.
"Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill."
I've got a cyrix chip in my car's mp3 player (soon to be radar detector monitor and engine status recorder) because it was the sheapest chip I could buy and I wondered if they suck as bad as everyone says. My MX/2-300 or whatever the heck it is sucks as much as everyone says they do. It's super hot all the time, and not nearly as fast as other socket-7 chips at the same clock speed. I had to underclock it just to get the system running stably (and to keep the outrageous power consumption down). I really hope cyrix gets their next chip working better, 'cause choices are always a Good Thing.
My current computer is a "PR" 166 Cyrix chip. This (non-mediaGX) system is very trusty and reliable, but not incredibly fast. I did build a mediaGX system once, and man that thing was not only slow and ugly, it gave me all kinds of stupid problems besides the fact that the first motherboard they sent was defective.
My next machine, after I have worn this one out plenty, will be a Crusoe-powered laptop. I have seen the light: the days of big, ugly tower cases for workstation users are numbered. Traditional cases make sense for servers, but hey! who needs expansion slots or serial ports anymore? Most of the technology has plateued and doesn't need to be upgraded often anymore (cpu speed, sound cards, video cards, ethernet, etc.) So why not by a small, fast mobile laptop??
This chip is mildly interesting but it doesn't look like it will be able to compete anywhere. It's main use will probably be as an upgrade to old PGA machines at some point. Quite a narrow market.
JD
I'm not concerned about Cyrix's performance vs Intel's low end stuff, I think it's cool that you could probably overclock one of those .18 puppies a good 60%, but what's more important is that cyrix is still alive to power cool things like the webpad and other integrated handheld devices. i know transmeta will be wonderful and great and all those things, but i doubt we'll see anything from them until november or december, and whatever that is, it will still be a 1st gen device. Cyrix has a little lead on the appliance pc market.
let's be honest, we all know that there is nothing impressive about a cyrix cpu powerwise, but if you consider that they're working on something that has video,sound and networking builtin, then you have something that may even power your cell phone in a year...
Cyrix has really unimpressed me for the last several years. This new parenting by Via may be the one thing that saves them. Dual issue FPU and a full speed L2 cache twice the size of the Celeron could make this a very nice CPU indeed.
Second Item
Here is an interesting idea (altho I doubt that it will ever happen): Motorola could buy cyrix (or better yet Transmeta) and gain access to the x86 market. They already make the chips for Macs, Palms, and many wireless devices. Transmeta looks like it may present a threat to Motorola's handhend dominance. This is especialy true if the Transmeta's chip can be set up to emulate a 68000, the chip that Motorola makes for the PalmPilot. Right now everytime someone buys a Palm Pilot it is money in Motorola's pocket. There are plenty of reasons not to do this of course (like cyrix's rep stinks to high heaven and no one has made it profitable) and I dont think the Motorola is in the mood for a radical change to their product line.
Anyone know if these chips will SMP on an ABIT
BP-7 (s370) or similiar. I'd love to run a cheap
dual 500 with a >=100 Mhz FSB without overclocking.
I was thinking the same thing. There was no Samuel in WarGames that I know of. It would have been quite a stretch for Cyrix to name a processor after the WOPR anyway. It would probably take about 10 minutes to ask if you'd like to play a game. And the really fast Tic-Tac-Toe...
It could be worse, I suppose... The AMD K6II could have been named after a supercomputer...
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
It turned out only one of these things were true. It did indeed cost less. But then again you get what you pay for. I remember I had such a hard time with a lot of software, only to call up tech support and find out that the product isn't Cyrix compatable or it needed a patch or something. One peice of hardware I bought (soundcard or something) turned out to be incompatable with Cyrix processors. Not only that, but performance was terrible. Sure it was a nice upgrade from my 486, but compared to actual Intel machines I used, it was pretty bad. Not only that, I found out later that their 6x86 '166' wasn't actually 166Mhz. It ran at 133 and had "special features that make it run as fast as if it were 166Mhz". What a clever marketing scheme. Intel should do that too: Come out with the Pentium 1.2Ghz that only runs at 800Mhz but has "special features" so it runs as fast as if it were 1.2Ghz.
In conclusion, I vowed to never buy another Cyrix processor as long as I may live. I advise others to do the same, and not to believe their hype. Remember what they delivered in the past, and that history often repeats itself.
Cyrix has always made chips. They used to be independent and had to get their chips made by the likes by ibm but then they were bought out by National Semiconductor.. they introduced the M2 at around this time, I believe, and dropped ibm and moved to the national Semi fabs. The M2's flopped (sort of) and National Semi lost a lot of money and decided to get out of the business. The only thing they made money on was the MediaGX processor, which was a really cheap chip that combined graphics and audio with the processor and National Semi used these as part of their WebPad reference designs. When Natinal jumped ship from the chips business, they sold Cyrix and all of its patents, trademarks, etc. to Via except for the MediaGX chip. So Cyrix still makes x86 chips, as part of Via, but National Semiconductor no longer makes x86 chips unless you count the MediaGX.. National are now dedicated to the embedded chips market..
So, with a name like Joshua, will it finally let me nuke the Russians?
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On the contrary - I think it's time the old monopoly was closed down, and we were introduced to something we haven't had in a LONG time in the consumer PC processor market - choice.
Cyrix/Via (with Joshua), AMD (with the K6-3/K6-2+) and Intel (with the Celeron) it would appear now ALL have Celeron-class (for want of a better term)processors in the marketplace - for the first time - all aimed at consumers.
While AMD and Intel are battling it out in the medium-high end market (P3 & Athlon) and AMD are soon to release top end processors to compete with Intel's Xeons, we now have a 3 way (and possibly 4 way if you include Transmeta) battle for the low end market.
We should be getting better products for less money as a result of this, as each manufacturer attempts to gain market share - and this can only be a good thing.
Well done Cyrix/Via.
Cyrix has had some problems. One big one with the 6x86 line was that the chips required more current than Intel chips. The motherboards were built to meet the demands of the Intel pentiums. The snafu came from the fact that cyrix was a budget chip, but it didn't work in the inexpensive motherboards. Cheap motherboards aren't going to throw in a good power supply for the hell of it. They have just enough to get by, in this case it was just enough for Intel chips. Up to that point, Intel was the only game in town, so it was understandable. This led to stability problems in Cyrix based systems.
The first system I built was a p150+ (60Mhz bus, 2x multiplier) with a no name HX chipset motherboard. It basically worked ok. When bought a big fan I could overclock it. When I gave it to my mom, I underclocked it to ensure stability.
It was a fine system for running linux and windows 95. It sucked for quake, but it was good for Descent I and II.
Actually, back in the heyday of the 6x86 (or maybe 5x86), the fastest pentium out was the vinilla Pentium sans MMX. Back then the performance of Cyrix chips (both FP and Int) were unmatched. Then the Pentium MMX came and brought out a really massive FPU, and Cyrix was left in the dust. The core architecture of the 6x86 is actually faster in integer apps than an equivilant Pentium MMX (maybe even PII) because a 233 MHz Cyrix performs like a 233MHz MMX for integer, but only runs at like 208 MHz or something.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Remember that the L2 cache is running at core frequency (like the Celeron), not half speed (like P2/P3's). This means that they'll probably be overclockable, and a nice little toy to play with. Just my 1/50th of a US$
Finally I get some recognition here. Glad to see more info on this processor. What a great name for it! Finally they name something after me! I feel so honored.
_joshua_
FiringSquad's Article
Too bad this cyrix chip looks as bad as the others, even though the silicon is still beta. I doubt this thing will be on the same level as a Celeron. Unless it is alot cheaper to get ahold of, I'd say screw Cyrix as always. :( Lethal Geek
I just want to clear up some of the confusion some people are having about Cyrix and their FPUs. In the past, Cyrix chips were the fastest you could buy, in integer OR fpu. It wasn't until the Pentium MMX and its pipelined FPU that the Cyrix name became synonomous with crappy FPU performance.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
and while not ultra fast, they are cheap and they DO work.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I have built two systems with Cyrix chips:
1) A PR-200 in July of 1997 for my sister as a wedding present. It is still running strong and they use it almost every day. When I ask them if they want to upgrade, they ask why. Seems that the Cyrix 200 is still fast enough for them. Even Tomb Raider III runs well on it (with the original VooDoo card that I put in it).
2) An MII-300 last year for my neighbor, in a system that I gave them as a gift. They think it's plenty fast also.
Neither have had any problems whatsoever, except for the MII-300 which started crashing a few months after I foolishly overclocked it to 333. I clocked it back down to 300 and it was fine.
Also, my friend built a system with a PR-166 years ago that still works great (although it seems slow as molasses now).
Cyrix have great integer performance and a phenomenal price/performance ratio. Sure their floating point is lousy (or at least was), but who cares? So what if my Quake III can't draw frames faster than my monitor refresh? Even a Cyrix 200 is a decent gaming platform for most people.
BTW I am an AMD guy myself, have a K6-233, K6-2 300, and K6-III 400. Next upgrade will be an Athlon, of course.
Yeah, but all the choices suck =). I don't mean to sound harsh, but there is not a compiler hacker on this planet who likes the x86 architecture... Moreover, the choice will be short-lived, as Intel starts flooding the channels with Merc, er, Itaniums. It will take a while for anyone else to implement the IA64 instruction set; until then we're stuck with (admittedly low-cost) x86 clones.
One thing that struck me about the Transmeta announcement was their huge emphasis on x86 binary compatibility. From a consumer's point of view, they're right on target - but as a hacker I'm quite sad to realize the true extent of the damage Intel's years-long monopoly wrought. We won't be free from the Ghost of 8088 for a long while...
Yes, let's have choice... Somebody start working on an Alpha, Sparc, or PowerPC clone!
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"Insert witty quote here."
Whether or not Intel looks good doesn't matter as much as whether or not some other company is taking away some of Intel's market share.
Cyrix's chips may be lousy for gamers or people doing heavy scientific computing due to lackluster FPU performance, but for the low-end market Cyrix is aiming at, that isn't such a big deal. If you just want to do web browsing, email and a little word processing, the Cyrix M-II's provide an excellent value. While that may not include a lot of geeks, there are a lot of people like my wife who the M-II is perfect for. I bought an M-II/300 for my wife, and she is more than happy with it. Personally, for me I prefer AMD processors (specifically my main box is K6 based), but I really don't think that Cyrix deserves the harsh treatment they get from a lot of people. Other than the very early Cyrix 6x86 chips that had serious overheating problems, they generally have built a reliable if uninspiring product. Given their excellent price/performance, I think they can be forgiven for a lot, especially since IDT (WinChip), their main competitor for that low-end market has basically given up entirely.
That is usually caused by bad memory and/or incorrectly set BIOS parameters or incorrectly set motherboard jumpers. It generally isn't caused by a faulty CPU, and as lots of people I know have successfully installed Linux on Cyrix chips from the 486's to the M-II, I don't think it is fair to blame Cyrix for something that probably isn't their fault.
Yeah well I heard someone once ran a cyrix w/o a cooling fan. Not only did it crash but the thing exploded into a giant mushroom cloud. When he woke up his kidney had been stolen, aliens gave him an anal probe, and his neighbor killed himself by duct taping a rocket engine to the top of his car. I have never actually owned a cyrix chip, but I know they are crap because this story must be true. I will NEVER run a cyrix. I don't care if they are the last chip makers on the planet. I would rather use a slide rule!
Early Cyrix 6x86's did indeed have overheating problems, even in desktop units (you needed a special 'Cyrix-approved' CPU fan/heatsink combos -- one that the fan spins at roughly twice the speed of a normal Pentium fan and the heatsink is about 1/2 again larger in order to get reliable operation). Toshiba made a big mistake putting such chips into laptops, most of which don't have CPU fains at all, and which often run hot even with Intel or AMD CPU's.
Later 6x86's and the M-II's seem to have fixed their overheating problems by switching to a much smaller die size.
While your 133 probably wasn't impressive compared to an Intel 133, it probably cost less than 1/2 what an Intel 133 did. You only get what you pay for, and for the money, the Cyrix chips generally have been a pretty good deal unless you are a gamer or do a lot of math intensive work like scientific computing or image processing.
Original Pentiums already had pipelined FPU. MMX has *nothing* to do with FPU. Cyrix has always sucked at FPU and integer performance was not as great as they claimed either. Just 3 month ago I upgraded from my olde crappy Cyrix "PR" 200 (which actually ran at 150) to AMD K6/2-300 and I am seeing a *huge* improvement in speed and, most importantly, *stability*. In addition to being slow, Cyrix CPUs are also very unreliable. I am never buying them again.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Early Cyrix 6x86's have overheating problems. In order to run reliably they require a special 'Cyrix-approved' chip fan/heat sink (fan spins at roughly twice the RPM and the heat sink is about 1/2 again as big as a standard Pentium fan). The 6x86MX and M-II's seem to have fixed those problems. The early chips also require a motherboard with a very good voltage regulator due to their high power consumption. If your Cyrix equipped machine has a cheapo motherboard, a standard Pentium style chip fan or if the BIOS parameters and/or motherboard jumper settings aren't configured correctly, then you may have problems.
I've had great luck with AMD processors, from the 486's to the K6 family. Most of my friends have recently bought K6-II or K6-III's and all of them are really happy with them including speed and stability. I would wholeheartedly recommend AMD CPUs compared to any similar priced to slightly more expensive Intel CPUs.
the fpu of the intel pentium mmx was pretty similar if not identical to the original pentium.
pentium mmx vs pentium:
added more L1 cache, 32k vs 16k (i think, been awhile)
added mmx instructions, note that these are integer only
tweaked out some of the superduper scalar out of order supercalifragilistic part of the processor. actually I think the part is called the TLB - translation look ahead buffer.
All in all I think it was around a 10% to 15% increase in performance at a given clock speed.
This put the pentium mmx ahead of the 6x86 in integer performance, and smoked it in fp performance.
> It's super hot all the time
Then you failed to use set6x86 to enable suspend-on-HLT. It's the one most important thing to do with Cyrix processors.
I have myself used 5x86, 6x86 and MediaGXm processors, and they were quite efficient; while they did have slower FPUs than Intel or AMD, the 5x86 at 90mhz actually ran most applications faster than the Pentium II (a brand new one at the time). The best point about Cyrix CPUs imho is that they're all optimized for 486 code. The 6x86 (a 4x25mhz version) was sensitive to overclocking, but ran fine at 4x30 - not at 4x33 though.
2 floating point units 2 MMX units 2 3DNow units 64kB 4-way L1 cache 256kB 8-way full speed on-chip L2 cache (64b interface with a 5-clock latency) The best, most efficient X86 integer unit out there - the Cyrix 686 integer unit. No multiplyer lock, so its compatable with any FSB speed between 66mhz & all the up to nearly 150mhz, if your MoBo & memmory can go that far. Made by VIA, so should be totally compatable & stable on any VIA 133A MoBo (fingers crossed) & finally a PR rating which is 'fair dinkum', & no more than 100 points above its mhz rating (PR500 is 400mhz, PR 533 is 433mhz). Actually Cyrix's PR ratings have always been accurate for their integer units, but was always taken with a grain of salt as far as floating point performance was concerned, plus towards the end of National Semi's stewardship, the gap between the PR rating & mhz was being stretched to the limit. But now with double the L1 cache of the Celeron, double the L2 cache of the Celeron, 2 fully pipelined FPUs, 2 MMX units & 2 3DNow units, the Joshua's PR rating is now on the conservative side. Plus they are dirt cheap, with even the 533 at less than $100. Looks like things don't look too good for Intel (well until Williamette/Foster anyway), what with the Athlon competing at the high end, Joshua at the low end, VIA competing with 133SDRAM chipsets, RAMBUS being too bloody expensive (plus its high latency), poor MTH SDRAM controller performance, Transmeta now being taken on by Taiwanese OEMs on the mobile front & of course with Merced/Itanium looking worse by the day (& with AMDs 64b Sledgehammer looking like it will more than twice as fast, as far as X86 code is concerned).
It's a shame, but the PR-rating system was actually a great idea. It could have gotten consumers away from the idea that More Mhz=Faster, which simply isn't true. Now we have manufacturers playing the numbers game, in which "speed demon" chips (Which run at a high clock speed) have an advantage over "braniac" chips (Which do more per clock cycle). We've now cut off a promising avenue of R&D, solely for marketing reasons.
It's not a problem now, but in the future we could run into a brick wall with Mhz and memory speed limits, which might be solved in part by making Braniac chips. By that time it may not be possible to pursue such chips, because the public will have become fixated on Mhz, and will not buy them.
When the PR ratings first came out, AMD and Cyrix were pretty conservative in their ratings--AMD even rated one of their 133 Mhz chips as a "PR 75". But with insufficiently rigid definitions of "PR" and no way of enforcing them, "PR" quickly turned into Public Relations. As Cyrix watched their margins and market share shrink, they began to play fast and loose with the ratings. Eventually Cyrix chips matched their Intel counterparts only under the most ideal circumstances. Towards the end Cyrix even moved the goalposts, by quietly redefining "PR" to match the average speed of "competing CPUs" in the market (ie, whoever else was slowest at the time).
I would agree that hype is generally a bad thing because it can set unrealistic expectations about a product. I remember when the Pentium 60's came out, and the place I worked for at the time bought several of them. They were real turkeys (FDIV and f00f bugged), especially for the money. I bought an AMD 486DX4-100 about the same time and it performed very similarly to the P60's for considerably less money. And it didn't have a lot of bugs in it either -- it is still working fine to this day (albiet, it hasn't been a machine I use on a daily basis for a long time). When it comes down to it, I almost never recommend that anyone buy something 'early on' unless they have thoroughly researched it and they absolutely need to have the latest thing for some real reason (not just to keep "ahead of the Jones'"). When you buy something that has just come out the price tends to be a lot higher than if you wait until it has been out a while. I prefer to buy one or two notches below the current top end.
Here's something you should never ask on /., but just how dumb am I?
Of the six machines on my home network, I have two Cyrix chips, three AMDs, and one genuine Intel (and that, believe it or not, is my amateur packet radio router running on a 386SX16! AMPR is like a 9600 baud ethernet without collision detection -- a 386SX is up to the job). One of the AMDs is an Athlon, and the Cyrix'es are a pre-MMX 6x86 "PR200" which, of course, runs at 150MHz, and an MII-333.
I knew the "PR" stuff was BS when I bought them. I bought them because they were cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. I'm not a big game player (Civilization is about all I play) and the first 6x86 ran fine for what, four years now? (God help you with Cyrix chips if your CPU fan dies, though!).
Here's my point: I researched the devices before I bought them. I knew how well they did integer operations, register operations, and floating-point (which I hardly ever use) operations compared with the Intels, and I knew what I would be using them for (mostly writing and compiling C/C++ code on Linux) and I knew how much they cost.
I haven't had a single problem or compatibility issue.
Is Cyrix so variable in quality that I had the only two that aren't lemons, or did a lot of people swallow a bunch of marketing BS and buy things they ought not to have bought given their intended use? I'm genuinely asking. I haven't had a single problem. Have I just been lucky?
Oh yeah, I don't have any MediaGX's despite how cheap they are because I do my homework and for a long time there were Xfree and other issues with that particular cheap chip. That's when I went back to AMD. (My other low end box is an AMD-486DX4 clone that I have running FreeBSD basically to serve up a couple of CDROM drives via NFS -- Another low end machine that remains adequate to its task. I put my "Webmaster in a Nutshell" and my "Java in a Nutshell" deluxe CD-ROMs in it and then use them wherever I am on my network, from desktops to my AMD laptop [sorry, 7 machines, 4 AMDs])