First post, by WJG6260
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Hello all,
I know this sounds like a foolish question, but I've been looking around here and there and have never seen a Cyrix DX-50 CPU. There's a few references out there to this particular CPU, namely on x86-guide here and on CPU-World here.
From what I understand--and from my personal experience--the Intel DX-50 is pretty fast, but the added wait states from the 50Mhz bus are somewhat disadvantageous when building such a system, especially if the motherboard is not up for the task of a 50Mhz bus. It seems like a well-tuned DX2-66 is just an all-around simpler, faster, and easier choice.
Cyrix 486s are another subset of oddities, in the sense that their off-cache accesses are quite fast, and their ALU performance is slightly less than that of their Intel/AMD counterparts. Their FPUs seem a little stronger though, at least from my rudimentary comparison of a 5V Cyrix DX2-80 to a 5v Am486DX2-80.
To that end, then, is it safe to presume that the Cyrix DX-50 is somewhere around an Intel DX-33 or AMD DX-40 in terms of sheer performance?
I feel like I've read something to the extent that the early Cyrix 486s post-Fascache models (Is it "M6," for the full 8k cache Cx486DXs?) had heat issues, and that's why the 4.0V and 3.6V models are more common, as they supplanted those earlier, hotter models. Is the Cyrix DX-50 then a pretty rare bird?
Thanks for the input, and I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and New Year!