Cyrix

Cyrix Corporation

Industry	Semiconductors
Fate	Merged & Disolved
Successor	sold to National Semiconductor (later sold to VIA Technologies), assets sold to Advanced Micro Devices
Founded	1988
Defunct	November 11, 1997
Headquarters	Richardson, TX, USA
Key people	Jerry Rogers, Tom Brightman (founders)
Products	6x86 MediaGX CPU
Number of employees	approx. 300

Cyrix Corporation was a microprocessor developer that was founded in 1988 in Richardson, Texas as a specialist supplier of math coprocessors for 286 and 386 microprocessors. The company was founded by Tom Brightman and Jerry Rogers. Cyrix founder, President and CEO Jerry Rogers, aggressively recruited engineers and pushed them, eventually assembling a small but efficient design team of 30 people.

Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor on 11 November 1997.

The first Cyrix product for the personal computer market was a x87 compatible FPU coprocessor. The Cyrix FasMath 83D87 and 83S87 were introduced in 1989. The FasMath was the fastest 386-compatible coprocessor and provided up to 50% more performance than the Intel 80387. Cyrix FasMath 82S87, a 80287-compatible chip, was developed from the Cyrix 83D87 and has been available since 1991.

Its early CPU products included the 486SLC and 486DLC, released in 1992, which, despite their names, were pin-compatible with the 386SX and DX, respectively. While they added an on-chip L1 cache and the 486 instruction set, performance-wise, they were somewhere between the 386 and the 486. The chips were mostly used as upgrades by end users looking to improve performance of an aging 386 and especially by dealers, who by changing the CPU could turn slow-selling 386 boards into budget 486 boards. The chips were widely criticized in product reviews for not offering the performance suggested by their names, and for the confusion caused by their naming similarity with Intel's SL line and IBM's SLC line of CPUs, neither of which was related to Cyrix's SLC. The chips did see use in very low-cost PC clones and in laptops.