Cyrix
CPU manufacturer Cyrix began in 1988 as a specialist manufacturer of
high-performance maths co-processors for 286 and 386 systems. The company
was founded by ex-Texas Instruments staff, and had a long but rather
troubled relationship with TI from that time on.
Cyrix founder Jerry Rogers was a hard-driving leader who head-hunted the
best engineers in the USA and pushed them mercilessly. His tiny 30-man
design team set themselves the task of first matching, and then beating
performance leader Intel at their own game. Much of the credit for this
belongs to Jerry Rogers himself. As an aggressive, go-getting leader he took
Cyrix from nothing to the mighty 6x86 - a faster chip than Intel's best.
But it was no use having the best chip in the world if few were buying it.
Cyrix had great product and fantastic pricing but needed a major OEM
customer - an IBM, a Compaq, or a Dell to give them long-term, steady
contracts. They had always done well in the independent market with the
smaller specialist shops, but a well-balanced order book has a mix of
customers, large and small. It was not impossible for a non-Intel
manfacturer to sell CPUs to the major PC makers - AMD had done it after all,
- but Cyrix could never quite close the big deals. Eventually they dispensed
with Jerry Rogers as CEO and added marketing people to the board. Within
just a few months they had sold the MediaGX to Compaq and other big sales
soon followed.
Cyrix had always been a fabless manufacturer: in other words, they designed
and sold their own chips, but farmed the actual manufacture out to outside
contractors. In the early days they mostly used Texas Instruments production
facilities, and they also used SGS Thompson extensively. In 1994, following
a series of disagreements with TI, and in search of high-tech, thin-wafer
production to match it with AMD and Intel, Cyrix turned to IBM
Microelectronics. For the next four years, Cyrix CPUs were all made by IBM.
As part of the deal, IBM got to make their own Cyrix-designed CPUs at a very
reasonable royalty.
Unlike AMD, Cyrix had never manufactured or sold Intel designs under
license, but designed everything in-house, from the ground up. So while the
AMD's 386s and even 486s had some Intel-written microcode software, the
Cyrix chips were all completely independent, clean-room designs.
Intel spent many years in the courts, claiming that the Cyrix 486 violated
Intel's patents. (Just as they did with every other x86 CPU manufacturer
right up until 1998.) By and large, Intel lost the Cyrix case. But the final
settlement was out of court: Intel agreed that Cyrix had the right to
produce their own x86 designs in any foundry that happened to already hold
an Intel license. Both firms gained out of this: Cyrix could carry on having
their CPUs made by Texas Instruments, SGS Thompson, or IBM (as it happened,
all holders of Intel cross-licenses); Intel avoided complete open slather in
the x86 market. Both firms were (presumably) happy to avoid yet another
round of mindless and expensive litigation. The follow-on 1997 Cyrix-Intel
litigation was the reverse: instead of Intel claiming that Cyrix 486 chips
violated their patents, now Cyrix claimed that Intel's Pentium Pro and
Pentium II violated Cyrix patents - in particular, power management and
register renaming techniques. The case was expected to drag on for years but
eventually be settled out of court. In fact it was settled quite promptly,
by another mutual cross license agreement. Intel and Cyrix now had full and
free access to each others patents - a remarkably sensible resolution that
let both firms get on with making better chips. Notice that it neatly
avoided the issue of law: such a settlement didn't say whether the Pentium
Pro violated Cyrix patents or not, it simply allowed Intel to carry on
making them either way - exactly as the previous settlement side-stepped
Intel's claim that the Cyrix 486 violated Intel patents.
In August 1997, while the litigation was still in progress, Cyrix merged
with National Semiconductor (who already held an Intel cross-license). This
provided Cyrix with an extra marketing arm and access to National
Semiconductor fab plants, which were originally constructed to produce RAM
and high-speed telecommunications equipment. (So far as manufacturing
technology goes, RAM and CPUs are very similar.) The IBM manufacturing
agreement remained for a while longer, but Cyrix eventually switched all
their production over to National's plant. The merger improved Cyrix's
financial base, and give them much better access to development facilities.
The merger also resulted in a change of emphasis: National Semiconductor's
priority was single-chip budget devices like the MediaGX, rather than the
higher performance chips that Cyrix had traditionally made. They clearly
lacked confidence in Cyrix's ability to compete at the high end of the
performance spectrum - a rather odd decision, as Cyrix had long since proved
their ability to come up with outstanding CPUs. Once Cyrix had National
Semiconductor's fab plants and reserves of capital behind them, they should
have been more able to compete with AMD and Intel's higher-end products, not
less. Perhaps National's reasoning was that the high-end looked promising
for Cyrix but the low-end MediaGX family parts had no real competition and
were an absolute certainty.
By mid-1999, it was clear to all that Cyrix were in trouble: it took them
almost a year to push the MII from PR-300 to PR-333, and despite occasional
promises, the flow of good new products was no more than exactly that -
promises. Cyrix parts gradually fell further and further away from the
performance mark, and their natural application shrank: to the mid-range, to
the entry-level, and eventually to nothing at all. As things stood, it was
obvious that Cyrix would soon disappear forever. Cyrix was left to stagger
along for several months longer: bereft of direction, with morale at an
all-time low, and losing their best engineers one by one. In the end, VIA
bought the feebly-twitching remains. By this time the original development
team was no more, the products were hopelessly out of date, and the only
thing left of value was the Cyrix name.
Over their short history, Cyrix had a huge influence on the average PC
buyer, even the buyer who never owned a Cyrix chip. Between them, Cyrix and
AMD lowered the cost of computing by many hundreds of dollars - and lowered
it for both their own customers and for Intel buyers too. Every time a
consumer bought a PC with an Intel chip, she saved several hundred dollars
simply because Cyrix (and AMD) had forced the market leader to moderate its
prices. Every time a consumer bought a PC with a Cyrix chip, she saved even
more. As a salable product line, Cyrix are gone beyond all hope of recovery
now, but their legacy of affordable performance remains to this day.
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