Cyrix: Math Coprocessors, a $12 Million Intel Settlement and Quake's Toll

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Cyrix was founded in Richardson, Texas, in 1988 by Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman. It started with math coprocessors such as the FasMath 83D87, which used hardware multipliers instead of Intel's CORDIC algorithm and ran faster on less power. Its 486SLC and 486DLC chips ran 486 instructions while fitting older 386 motherboards. With about 300 employees and no factory of its own, Cyrix contracted production to Texas Instruments and SGS-Thomson. When Intel sued over patents, Cyrix won in federal and state courts in Texas, filed antitrust counterclaims, and Intel paid it $12 million to settle before trial in Sherman, Texas.

A deal with IBM Microelectronics gave Cyrix volume, though IBM could sell Cyrix designs under its own brand. The 1995 6x86 beat Pentiums on business software and was sold with PR ratings, so a 133 MHz part was labeled P166+. But its floating point unit lacked pipelining, and John Carmack's Quake, tuned for the Pentium, crawled on it. The 1996 MediaGX put CPU, audio and graphics on one chip and sold by the millions to Compaq and Packard Bell. After a 1997 merger with National Semiconductor, the MII ran hot and its 83 MHz bus pushed peripherals to 41.5 MHz. Engineers left, the remains went to VIA Technologies, and the MediaGX lived on as the Geode line that AMD acquired.

• The 1996 film Eraser digitally changed its villain company from Cyrex to Cyrez after Cyrix objected.
• Clean room reverse engineering used two isolated teams, one documenting what a chip does and one designing from that manual alone.
• Centaur Technology CEO Glenn Henry called National Semiconductor a big smokestack company.
• The MII also lacked an instruction needed to fully use the Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card.
• AMD's 2006 Geode version ran on 0.9 watts, and Intel created its Celeron budget line to compete at the low end.