Cyrix 6x86

en.wikipedia.org

24 points·doener··5 comments

I was a fan of the Cyrix line of processors when I first started playing with free Unixes like NetBSD. They didn't have the bugs of the early Pentiums, were worlds more affordable, and have very respectable integer performance, which is quite useful for Unix.

They were scorching HOT, had its own variant of Pentium F00F bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_coma_bug and not pipelined FPU made them suck at 3d games. Cyrix screwed by promoting PR performance metrics and initially trying to charge Intel prices, AMD was also guilty of this hilarious trying Pentium 2 pricing on highly clocked K6-2 while $100 Celerons beat those CPUs handily.

I had one of these. It was a P90, clocked at 90 MHz, but which claimed to be the perf equivalent of an Intel Pentium at 100Mhz. You can see these "P" numbers in the wikipedia article. From what I remember it worked fine, but I mostly used that PC to screw around with Slackware and work on my CS assignments.

I had one in that era, they sucked for whatever opcodes mp3 decoding required

Did you try using the MAD MP3 decoder, which only relied on fixed point? I remember trying it several times and comparing the audio output to the other decoders and wondering what the deal was. I had a Pentium though and didn't know enough about floating point to understand the issue.

https://www.underbit.com/products/mad/

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