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Cyrix III Benchmarked

Posted by emmett on from the but-it-ain't-that-great dept.

electricmonk writes: "Tom's Hardware has just posted their review of the Cyrix III. They benchmarked it against the older Cyrix designs, and a Celeron, and the Celeron beat the crap out of all of them. They aren't meant for desktops, however, so it really isn't a valid comparison. But it is very overclockable, and runs so cool that it can work without a fan. Quake III on an Internet appliance, anyone?"

9 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Joshua. by be-fan · · Score: 3

    For those of you who didn't know, the Cyrix III was originally supposed to be based on the Joshua core. It was supposed to be a highly integrated chip. It had a two way superscaler core, and was very RISC-like. It was supposed to debut at 600+MHz at a cost of only about $60. Additionally, it was to have integrated Voodoo-2 level graphics and a memory bus capable of transferring 3.2GB/sec using multiple channels of RDRAM. For more info, you can look to issues of MaximumPC where Tom Halfhill wrote an article about he proc.

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  2. Cyrix MII by talonyx · · Score: 3

    I remember when Cyrix was THE competition for Intel. AMD were the little suckers with slow chips, and Cyrix were the runners up that got swamped every time.

    Now AMD is big, Intel is big too... and Cyrix is still lagging. But they can be good, too.

    With a sufficient amoutn of funding, and a good market niche such as Internet appliances that will require low power, Cyrix might find a good fight. And they might be good competition for Transmeta in this market.

  3. The perfect (shudder)companions by jayhawk88 · · Score: 4

    Cyrix 3's? Now I guess we know what the new Packard Bell's will be built around. Add in a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive, and I think you could officially refer to them as Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal...

  4. Slashdot: Regurgitating Author Opinion by Chiasmus_ · · Score: 5

    The article here states explicitly that the Celeron pretty much "smoked" the Cyrix--and, probably not coincidentally, so does the page the benchmarks are posted on. Looking at the actual benchmarks, on the other hand, doesn't exactly tell the same story.

    In fact, while the Celeron humiliated the Cyrix in graphic-intensive trials, the Cyrix really held its own or surpassed the Celeron's performance in the majority of those operations which did not involve a lot of pixel-crunching.

    So, despite what the text of this Slashdot article says, the Cyrix may be a very useful tool, even if it won't make your frags look cooler.

    Do Slashdot authors actually look at the pages they report??

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    1. Re:Slashdot: Regurgitating Author Opinion by technos · · Score: 3

      Cyrix chips have never been fireballs; and this one is no exception. They are great, cold chips for installed systems and cost sensitive applications.. People looking for secondary market PII will have a reasonable primary solution to fall back on.

      I'm hoping they turn it into another GX, EG a low power, 'put me anywhere' chip and board..

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  5. Get a Duron. by Oscarfish · · Score: 3
    I'm a proud Pentium III (500E @ 775) and Celeron II (566 @ 993) owner, but the recent benchmarks and overclocking reports (see Anandtech review here) say the Duron is the best deal now. I really hope it will get some decent motherboard support - with the exception of the ASUS K7* and Abit KA7 boards, AMD's chips have always suffered because of quality boards - FIC SD11 anyone?

    With the right motherboards, the Duron will be a real winner. Maybe stick a HighPoint chip on there, to circumvent Via's and AMD's disk transfer rates which are in the crapper...and give us some overclocking options...and you've got a great opportunity for overclocking heaven if you stick an Alpha on it!

    Hopefully Soyo will make a decent Duron board - the 6BA+ IV, their flagship BX model, which my 500E is on, is the best board I've ever used. It's incredibly stable even running 1.5 times faster than normal (image here), and if they make a Duron board I can't wait to see how far people take these things.

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    Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t

  6. Tom's Charts by Effugas · · Score: 5

    Those are the most disgusting charts I've ever seen:

    Tom can say what he will about RDRAM, and nVidia, and 3Dfx, and whatnot. I'll be amused, but I'm not going to get pissed.

    These charts piss me off.

    Half a frame per second lost from AGP Fast Writes in one game does not a half-chart spanning differential make.

    Graphing two values against eachother is meaningless if the scale is not consistent from graph to graph, you just end up with "more" vs. "less" being visually amplified, without "perceptably equal" even being an option.

    Fifty Pixels Of Hype over .5 FPS? Are you kidding? (No, I didn't count exactly fifty pixels. So sue me.)

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  7. New performance metric needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3
    They aren't meant for desktops, however, so it really isn't a valid comparison. But it is very overclockable, and runs so cool that it can work without a fan.

    We need a new performance metric to sort out this mess. How about the number of MIPS per WATT?

  8. Get a Cyrix by fluxrad · · Score: 4

    Get a cyrix-III a Maxtor Hard drive and Win95 (OSR1). Add in 32Meg of RAM and make sure you bought the box from Packard Bell.

    Your box gets it's very own darwin award!


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

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    "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume