Because Cyrix is a fabless company. Have to rely on IBM to produce their chips. Consequently, for every 10 chips IBM produce for Cyrix, ibm keeps 5 for itself and sell under the brand IBM.
TRUE
Worse yet, IBM is selling the cyrix chip cheaper than Cyrix themselves, thus cutting into cyrix's profit, giving them serious competition on top of AMD and Intel.
TRUE and FALSE
Early in the 6x86's life Cyrix was charging premium prices for the chip. IBM did undercut them. In October, Cyrix cut prices across the board. They have achieved price parity(while improving profitability) and now there is no real difference in prices.
Cyrix has had cash flow problem for a long time.
TRUE Had is the key word. Cash went up $30 million in the last quarter.
cyrix.com
Cyrix chip has heat dissipation problem
FALSE
Back when they were manufacturing the 6x86 on IBM's .6u process, heat was a problem. It became less of problem when they moved to a .44u process(optical shrink). It is no longer an issue with the .35u process(process shrink). They have 2.8v 6x86s now.
cyrix.com
Cyrix chip is weak in FPU--->Can't play quake very well :( or other
FPU intensive application
TRUE and FALSE
The 6x86 runs Quake poorly, since Quake was optimized for the Pentium. The 6x86's floating point performance is a non-issue for most real-world applcations.
cyrix.com
Compatibility problem. This is actually quite minor. For example
Win NT 4.0 is known to crash on older version of Cyrix chip.
FALSE
It never crashed under Win NT. It suffered a performance hit running NT on version 2.6 of the 6x86, because Microsoft used the wrong motherboards for their testing(Microsoft turned off the write-back cache on the chip). Microsoft later fixed this(funny how the fixes never get the same attention as the "problem").
Some popular games don't work on Cyrix, because Win 95 recognizes Cyrix as a 486 chip(maybe corrected in Win 97, dunno for sure)
TRUE and DON'T KNOW
Win 95 does recognize the 6x86 as a 486. Here is a list of games that run on the 6x86:http://www.cyrix.com/process/support/games.htm
Also their next generation chip M2 faces stiff competition from
AMD(which wasn't a factor in their 686 series) In addition, AMD
is ahead of Cyrix in MMX chips.
It's good that the K6 will help extend the life of socket 7, since the M2 uses it also. AMD will provide competition. It is unknown how far ahead AMD is, but M2 should be out around mid-year. AMD is building the K6 on IBM's 5 metal layer process so it should be interesting to see how long it takes them to produce at decent yields.
205.181.112.101
No, I don't work for them. I do own quite a large chunk of stock in the company, so I try to keep abreast of news related to the company.
If you run Win 95, there is no faster platform and the price/performance is also unbeatable.
Bob |
