Cool down.

Check out this little piece of disaster on eBay.

Oh that makes me want to vom... I've seen busted open chips at work before, but not like this. And the killer is theres some chunked up Socket 4 Pentiums and a broken Pentium pro in there. Ugh.

Due to the high price of gold, I think we'll be lucky even to see a Cyrix 6x86 or MII on eBay in 5 years time. My hopes for acquiring an MII-433GP are starting to vanish.

A coworker kindly donated this to me today...now to build up a proper system to do some testing!

feipoa wrote:

Due to the high price of gold, I think we'll be lucky even to see a Cyrix 6x86 or MII on eBay in 5 years time. My hopes for acquiring an MII-433GP are starting to vanish.

I said the same thing about Pentium Pro's a while back. You'll be able to buy Socket 8 motherboards but have no chips to put in them unless you already own them.

gwb wrote:

A coworker kindly donated this to me today...now to build up a proper system to do some testing!

I have that exact CPU! It used to be my main CPU in 97-98. Yours is in pretty good shape too. Good working little chip, but not of much use these days if you've got 6x86MX's lying around.

Cyrix, haha, I have four or five 686 chips laying around. They used to run very, very hot. If you didn't buy a good brand of heatsink/fan for them, they would overheat quickly. They were the first CPUs I ever had to use thermal grease on.

Just for laffs, try using an AWE-64 card on one 😀

Which version of the Cyrix did you have AWE64 issues with? The standard 6x86, a 6x86L, a 6x86MX, or a MII? Thanks.

The Cyrix MII 2.2v parts run pretty cool though and reach up to 300Mhz.

feipoa wrote:

Which version of the Cyrix did you have AWE64 issues with? The standard 6x86, a 6x86L, a 6x86MX, or a MII? Thanks.

As far as I know, all Socket 7 Cyrix/IBM processors had compatibility problems with the wavesynth of the AWE-64.

I had a Cyrix 586 for a while. It was a strange chip, better than a 486 but not as good as a pentium 😜

I guess that would depend on which Pentium you were comparing it to.

Does anyone know the release date of the 6x86-100 MHz chip in comparison to the 5x86-100 MHz piece? I think the 5x86 - 100 came out around the 30th week of 1995, but I feel the 6x86 - 100 came out much later, perhaps Q4 of 1995.

feipoa wrote:

I guess that would depend on which Pentium you were comparing it to.

Does anyone know the release date of the 6x86-100 MHz chip in comparison to the 5x86-100 MHz piece? I think the 5x86 - 100 came out around the 30th week of 1995, but I feel the 6x86 - 100 came out much later, perhaps Q4 of 1995.

Wiki says the 6x86 wasn't released until some time in 1996. I did read somewhere that the 5x86 was released before the 6x86 was ready. It was easier for them to get it out the door because it was a lot less complex than the 6x86 which required more development time.

I know the Cyrix 5x86-133's came out in the 49th week of Dec. 1995, or earlier. The 6x86-133 MHz pieces probably came out mid-1996. I wonfer if Cyrix had issues with their double pipeline design, or perhaps a frequency struggle with branch prediction.

According to the Red Hill PC hardware museum (long-time Australian PC dealer http://redhill.net.au/c/c-7.html ), the 6x86 PR-120 (100 MHz core, 50 MHz bus) was released in December of 1995. (though I believe that's the official Cyrix release date, which means it may not have been available in quantity until a fair bit later -an inconsistent problem with many new CPUs)
Note, the Red Hill guys are definitely fans of Cyrix parts. 😉 (and AMD too, or good, practical price-performance hardware in general)

And yes, that's definitely the 100 MHz model (the 5x86 was clocked faster around the same time -though obviously far better per-clock performance), and all the original 68x8s were simple clock doublers, no fractional multipliers, unlike the Pentium and K5. (which also meant generally slower buses on early models and extra fast buses for the later PR-200 at 75 MHz)

Cyrix CPUs are definitely neat, though it's a real shame what happened to the company (and correspondingly, their products and engineering talent) under National Semiconductor . . . and to some extent with VIA even, though by that point there wasn't much left to ruin.
VIA did manage to finally get the 180 nm PR-433 out and the pre-release of the much improved Cayenne core . . . except they'd moved it to Socket 370 and dropped Super 7 -barring the neat L3 cache setup of the K6III/+ chips- and ended up dropping the design entirely in favor of the WinChip based Centaur core. (and the logic behind that alone seems a bit mixed . . . sure, the die was smaller and the clock speed scalability was better, but the transistor count would be about the same if the Cayenne would have been if stripped to 128k cache, and the per clock performance of the Centaur chip is so much worse that the higher clock speeds weren't really worthwhile, and the multimedia/FPU performance was even worse -while the Cyrix design had finally addressed those issues to a fair extent)
Getting one of those preproduction Cayenne Cyrix III chips would probably be the holy grail for Cyrix CPU fans/collectors. 😁

Though, on the note of the Centaur/VIA chips, it is at least neat to see a (more or less) 486 class chip being scaled up to GHz class speeds if nothing else. 😉 (OTOH, imagine how the old Cyrix core might have scaled up on newer revisions on modern processes)

And another note on the 2.2V 180 nm MII PR-433 is that it seems to overclock rather well, at least given the few reviews I could find online. (apparently quite stable at 400 MHz vs 300 MHz stock, though a bit tricky beyond that -not sure about FSB overclocks)
And, unsurprisingly (given the smaller die and voltage levels), it runs much cooler than the late model 2.9V 250 nm parts.

I'll just leave these here:

20120215-IMG_7302.jpg by squallstrife, on Flickr

Blasphemy!

Blasphemy that they're not installed in a system? 😜

maybe in addition to the Cyrix fanclub he's also a member of the Church of Model M, and is referring to your keycap placement 😜

SquallStrife wrote:

I'll just leave these here: […]
Show full quote

I'll just leave these here:

20120215-IMG_7302.jpg by squallstrife, on Flickr

Leave them on top of a CRT, somewhere in the vicinity of the magnetic field.