[KLUG Members] Ahh Cyrix, I remember him well...

[Bryan J. Smith]

[ Moving to HARDWARE ]

On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 08:56, Randall Perry wrote:
> Yeah, I remember when wild-eyed Glenn Henry (former Big Blue upper level 
> developer) went to IDT with the idea to create the winchip (centaur).  If I 
> remember right, they licensed the MMX instructions out so they would be 
> compatible with Intel and AMD's MMX.

Well, Intel wasn't exactly in the "mood" to "license" at first.  But
they did license it -- although I don't think the first chip had it, it
wasn't until the WinChip2?

The IDT WinChip was an interesting design.  It did not have out-of-order
execution and a few other details.  They built it with a minimum logic
set, so it took little time to go from first design to end-user silicon
(only 18 months), put a huge-@$$ cache on the sucker (64KB L1 was it? 
which was unheard of at the time), and it ran at 3.3V so it would work
in just about any mainboard.

The follow-up WinChip2, 3 and ended with 4 before they got bought out by
ViA.

> Cyrix made up their own MMX instructions 

Largely because they were the first to release a Socket-7 processor and
Intel wasn't licensing at the time if I remember correctly.

> (I got bit by that when I put a winmodem-junk into a commodity Cyrix M2-200 
> box-junk that required MMX).  They also used that MediaGX processor in a 
> couple of notebooks and desktop mobos.  Terrible performance with MS OSs.

WinModems easily need 50-100MIPS -- so there's half your CPU now busy.

> I also remember when IBM concurrently manufactured processors for AMD, Cyrix 
> and WinChip (pretty much everyone non-intel) and yet IBM always prefers the 
> Intel way.  Kind of like why AOL uses a hacked up Internet Explorer when they 
> purchased Netscape a technological century ago.

Engineering and marketing _rarely_ agree.  Otherwise Intel would stop
farting around with SSE and build some seriously powerful chips.  I know
several Intel engineers (and former engineers) personally.

> On another note, I am still chuggin' away on resolving these problems I 
> inherited.  Adam, since you are so fond of the RS6000s, I might have to give 
> you a holler on them.  This is my first exposure to them.  
> On a lighter note, things are much nicer, now that I just got a new Inspiron 
> 4100. (PIII 1.13, ATI Radeon, DVD/CDRW, 320MB RAM, 30gig, Accupoint (eraser 
> head) and touchpad).  I just dumped and reloaded it with WinXP, W2k Server and 
> just downloaded Debian Potato ISOs to load.  Things almost feel normal again.  

Normal with Windows???  I've been running Linux on my Toshiba 2805-S402
for over a year now.  P3-850, nVidia GoMobile 16MB, DVD/CDRW, 256MB RAM,
20GB HD.  I should have waited a few months and gotten the ones with
more memory and disk, but I wanted the first notebook with an nVidia
GoMobile.  Awesome Linux OpenGL performance!

-- Bryan

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com