Super interesting! I used to have an old recycled "thin client" PC with one of these CPUs in it -- built onto the motherboard, of course. I didn't know much about it -- but now I do. Thanks! PS: I'm really loving your channel, one of my favorites!

This CPU/SoC design eventually evolved into the AMD Geode.

This makes me miss my Cyrix :( It was lost in a house when the roof collapsed (Leak that wasnt detected and over time erroded and boom) on my storage / Computer room and it was full of computers (i was a packrat for computers and parts saving them from the landfill) ... Destroyed it all from water damage and the weight of the concrete crushed Everything in the room, all my Crt;s exploded, you name it, all written off ... and back then it wasnt worth what it is today so insurance fucked me something fierce . Thank you for bringing these to video so i can relive / re experience things, albeit vicariously :) Cheers .

All the legacy video modes, including text and 16 color modes, were emulated in SMM on that processor. If you were in anything but a 256 color or true-color mode, every access to video memory (0xb0000 through 0xaffff) tripped an interrupt and some code written in a compiled higher level language would translate that into operations supported by the CPU's video code. For the legacy 256 color mode, I believe access to most legacy registers were also emulated, which likely explains why DOOM was struggling for you. It wasn't the throughput to VRAM, it was all the palette tricks that DOOM used for animation slowing things down. For text modes, the emulation code had to actually detect what part of the text buffer changed, and manually draw updated characters(and their backgrounds) into graphics RAM. I would be interested in what it would be like to play Zork or Dwarf Fortress on that chip without external video. I know at least one BIOS vendor that eventually optimized this to reduce the CPU hit by doing lazy updates for text modes on a timer. The performance of 16 color graphics modes was particularly dismal compared to native hardware video solutions. Writing a byte to a legacy 16 color mode can write 8 bits to up to 4 bit planes at once, for a total of 32 bits written and 8 pixels updated per write. The software emulation had to break that byte into 8 bits, determine how those bits would change the colors based on the selected bit planes, and then manually write any pixels that had changed color to the native screen buffer. This silicon was also used in some arcade game cabinets. If that confuses you, consider that the silicon video did have optimized bitblt support that allowed it to update the screen at a blistering pace, assuming you wrote the code *for* that silicon and didn't mess around with legacy.

I did not realize before that these were the forerunners of today's APUs. The number of discrete components on that mainboard shows just how integrated the CPU is. Normally on a board of that vintage, there would be double the amount of capacitors and what not. Anyway, cool video, I enjoyed seeing the Voodoo card. My two Voodoo2 cards really woke up my K6-2 system for playing Quake and Quake2, really enjoyed those times.

I have a media GX system in a mini tower case. I use it as a fast system for DOS games. I love that it's so simple and compact.

We take CPU integrated graphics granted these days, but this was quite ahead of its time.

Now that's a trip down memory lane! My system was very similar 1998-2001. Got a drop-in upgrade board from TigerDirect catalog and it had this setup. Actually 233MHz but it was stable overclocked to 266. I didn't realize the architecture was this different from Pentium. Later I got a second-hand 200MHz Pentium MMX tower but still used the Cyrix as my main system because I thought it was faster. They felt about the same navigating through Win98SE but it looks like the Pentium would have wiped the floor w/ the Cyrix in actual benchmarks. I wish I still had the board. It was very tiny for its time. 2x PCI, 1x ISA, and almost all the ports were via breakout cables because the board was so small.

Top video again! Waiting for the NexGen video 😀

Had a board that looked just about exactly like that in the first computer I bought with my own money. I was going into my sophomore year of high school and bought it for 500 bucks with my lawn mowing money. Bought it from tiger direct. Slowly upgraded it into a whole new computer, lol. Started off with a dvd card and player, then a voodoo, cd burner, huge memory bump and then next came a socket 7 bored with a pentium 200 mmx that I overclocked to 233. What a great memory. Love this video.

If nothing else the Cyrix Media GX chips and lower priced K6 (once the K6-2 line was out) chips from AMD showed Intel there was money to be made at the lower end of the CPU market. That led Intel to release the Celeron line in order to compete. I worked in the industry back then and there was a big push from OEMs like Compaq (who used the Media GX in some budget desktops,) Gateway and Acer (just to name a few) to lower the price of your average desktop PC, especially for retailers. In the mid 90's it was a big deal to be able to sell a whole "budget" PC with monitor for $999 (especially if it was "multimedia PC") and around 1999 $499 was a possible price point which was an even bigger deal. Those OEM's knew that in order to a PC into a maximum amount of homes they had to bring the initial cost down. My own family spent $2000 in 1992 on a midrange 486 PC and 14 inch monitor. No sound card or CD-ROM included. We had to finance that purchase just to do it! That would be like spending $3,729 on a PC today. For that kind of money today you could buy (or build) a seriously beefy PC!

Very modern looking motherboard, the general layout and the ports is like something from a decade later

I made up a few Media GX systems to donate back in the early 2000's. The boards were nice enough, not so fast but plenty cheap and great to build cheap for donation using computer show parts. I can't imagine collecting them but I guess it takes all kinds to make a world 😀

Back in the day I had (albeit for a couple of months only) a Compaq desk computer, with that same gold MediaGX SOC @ 233Mhz. Can't remember the exact model... That was my 1st true "multimedia PC": it had some AMAZING speakers, and the integrated soundcard was good enough to make full use of them. The CPU while lagging behind other friend's PCs at the same speed, wasn't a slacker either and with Windows 98SE was snappy enough to handle my productivity, gaming and MP3 playing of those days... Thank you for bringing back good memories! :)

I recently started collecting CPUs, and really enjoy your channel!!

One of my favourite retro channels without a doubt. Never even knew that a CPU like this existed. :)

Excellent video, thanks.

It is essentially an APU before that even became mainstream. Much of the tech used in this lived on with AMD's Geode iirc. Btw, you're from Styria, right? A lot of people tend to notice your Schwarzenegger-esque accent hence I was wondering.

Cool to see those Cyrix chips, didnt know they were owned by national semiconductors.

Thank you for a great video and for the link to the ebay auction. I've had two mediaGX cpus in my collection for years but nothing to run them on. Today I just got my board, started tinkering with it and wanted to thank you.

Thank you for the good memories.

Interesting. I wrote device drivers for an embedded cars which includes the MediaGX processor. It was an interesting chip which used software traps to emulate (previously) hardware features and this had some impact on speed, but it still worked well for us and our customers

For the time Cyrix was really pushing more integration and doing some really innovative stuff. I never did get my hands on this CPU.

Great video! Thanks for sharing this. I did not know about this CPU at all. Very interesting.

this is actually REALLY interesting. proper system integration on a very old motherboard/cpu combo

wiedermal ein sehr schönes Video! alles gute dir. freue mich wie immer auf mehr von dir!

Good to see this review. I tried to find this before and it is true that the motherboards are very hard to get :/

Keep going!! Excelent source of info!!!

Na endlich hört man den tollen Dialekt mal raus, grüße an den lieben Nachbar aus Bayern. Vielen Dank auch für das tolle Video, mach bitte weiter so.

Very interesting video, I didn't know of the existence of this Cpu (SOC)!

Very nicely done. I've been staring at that very eBay listing for a good while, but still can't come up with a good enough excuse to own one of these. Nonetheless, the GX was conceptually ahead of its time, as whilst SoCs had existed for a long while, the GX was certainly the first real attempt to get one into the consumer market that I can think of. Absolutely love the package design of that 5530 companion chip, quite unusual, almost makes one think of the IBM Broadway or something.

I purchased a Cyrix processor from Best Buy to upgrade my Packard Bell back in the good old days. I think I bumped it from a 25Mhz to 33Mhz or 50Mhz.

This is fun, what was a low end budget solutions are 20-30 years later "oddities for collectors" :) And as always, excellent video!

Do you have any Transmeta Procs?

Oh yeah, some 3dfx !

That's supper cool and interesting!

Hi peter, good job!

I own a rare Samsung Sens 505 notebook with a Cyrix MediaGX 120 (100Mhz) and its performance is really really low (something like a 486DX2-66 or similar). It's a curious machine but it definitely was a bad hardware for any application on last '90s.

It would be interesting to know more about the SB16 compatibility and the MPU-401 interface.

Many of the early MGX systems got away with using single 72 pin simms and were 32 bit data path. But I do not recall them ever getting that high of bandwidth in Sysbench on the ram chart. Did the MGX really have a 64 bit interface at 33mhz? I didn't think they did. If not then its utilizing the bus interface at about as high as is possible. 110mb/s on a bus with a theoretical max of 132mb/s is very impressive. Though not impossible I guess. Technically the MMX233 you had there has a 66x64 bit interface at 512mb a second. And its utalized at 185 for L2 cache and 151 for ram. I guess at 66mhz there is a bunch of extra overhead in longer pre-charge cycles or refresh cycles? I am not as familiar with it as I would like to be. It may also be my suspicion that most block transfers were also only ever 32 bits across the Pentiums processor bus and never stacked except for non-dma data transfers. The only performance comparisons I ever made back in the day were an MGX 200 against a Pentium S 133 and the P133 blowing its doors off in any benchmark we could throw at it. But the dedicated PCI graphics on the P133 really did do a lot of extra lifting.

I recall at the time working in retail selling computers that we had Packard Bell computers with these CPUs featured.

The difference between Doom on the internal VGA card and the S3 card is probably due to the memory bus being shared between the CPU and internal VGA card of the CPU. Doom is very sensitive to that.

Years ago Cyrix sent us samples to test and create an OEM sample with the intent of running BeOS. It ran better then Windows 98.. although we had a number of major hiccups with this system and just decided to abandon excusive support for it. But the chip and motherboard had been fairly cheap for the time, I personally liked the idea since most I knew just wanted something to surf the net. BeOS had been the perfect candidate for such systems.

with a custom made 3d printed case you could make a nice dos gaming "console"! the cpu king with another hit video :)

Around 2010, I was in contact with a PCB design/assembly house that could design your PCB and assemble it for you with their in house SMD machine and through hole machines. And they were ACTIVELY trying to find more Cyrix/NS/AMD Media GX and Geode chips, the old one, not the newer rebranded Athlon ones. Because they were building slot machine boards for their customers, and video slot machine don't need much power, and I guess they likely run some DOS based slot machine software that just works, and don't want to mess with newer chip and update their software. They were literally buying every salvage Media GX and Geode board they can find to desolder the chips off them. an interesting side story, I asked them why not try VIA CPUs and chips, and they were horrified... They tried them before, and it was just so full of bugs that they couldn't possibly make it work in a reasonable budget...

Pity I couldn't find my old Cyrix t-shirt to wear while watching this :( The onboard GPU will be slowed drastically by using system memory, that bus will be very busy while gaming which will add a lot of latency with graphics calls. The offboard GPU will not have that issue and will show the full power of that fine little core. I loved Cyrix chips when I was an OEM (which is why I had a Cyrix shirt). Great performance for the money. The Intel options of the time just couldn't match them for that price, tho if you could afford Intel, you really did benefit. But so many people wanted a low cost machine.

The lineage of the Cyrix 5x86 is amazing. I have a an industrial grade ITX mainboard, 12 vdc powered, with an AMD Geode LX clocked at 700 mHz whiich can be overclocked to 800 mHz.

I still own a Compaq presario 1215 laptop with the 180Mhz Cyrix Media GX, 80MB ram, 6GB HDD, dual scan flat panel monitor and win 95, It still works fine and even the original battery still works (for maybe 20min). In real world performance, it is about as fast as a Pentium 90. I bought it from a friend in 2000 for $50.00!

Yesss, very nice

Didn't know they pushed the 5x86 to those freqiencies, interesting!

Good old Cyrix! My first PC was a Cyrix 486DLC-40, second Cyrix 486DX4-100 (holy hell, what an improvement over the upgraded 386) and then a Cyrix 6x86MX-PR200 with an SIS IGP (very crappy, even in DOS.

Beautiful... my 1st PC came with a Cyrix 5x86 120+.. how many good memories, playing with the register of the cpu xD... I re-ensamble an M2 333+ (75x3.5) with a voodoo Rush (macronix) and a AWE64 (with the creative speakers) just to play in a decent setup all those games with the best graphics of that epoch... Maybe you can use the 6x86optimizer to get some good perf out of that... Try it! Tnks for the video!!!

I remember upgrading from a p1 133 non mmx to a pr233+. I was really disapointed.

Aaahh, NFSIISE, fond memories

Interesting chip (and company), thanks for sharing. I had no idea it required a special motherboard! Is the Soundblaster integrated onto the CPU or is that on the mainboard?

Any chance you could do a comparison of the AMD K6-2 and K6-3 processors? Love to see if I really was missing out much when I couldn't afford the K6-3 when it came out.

Is the chip multiplier unlocked? Maybe there's a few more frames in her :) Interesting chip, I remember these at the time although never saw one running. It does seem like a pretty capable budget offering for the time especially when paired with a Voodoo, I get the feeling it is still somewhat CPU bottlenecked though from those benchmarks. Of course for a cheap PC it would have been a fine choice for most people.

I wonder why they uses 4x86 architecture instead of 6x86 architecture. Maybe because of the thermal limitations / for low power consumption.

Great video. Your BIOS was set to 2020 though!

this would be a good candidate for a diy project since it's a SOC

Very nice and interesting video! Isn't this Cyrix CPU considered as a 486 class CPU? (with some extensions of course)

My first "barebones built" PC was from TigerDirect. I got this TigerDirect branded system that was a "MediaGX" 120mHz 5x86, everything was "onboard" and it shared 1meg video memory, had all the ports this one had less USB. It came already mounted in the case. all I did was install the RAM, HD, and CD-ROM and old 33.6 cirrus-logic modem/soundcard for telephony. I think i gave around $400 for this "package" in 1997-1998, 16megs RAM. But mine had the "soldered in" CPU. It had a blue anodized heatsink with no fan! All my games were in "software mode" LOL

I was always curious about the Cyrix cpus

Amazing how these old tech specs can cause so much nostalgia. Was the physical but not electronic comparability with Socket 7 due to Intel claiming “intellectual property” infringement? This might be confabulation on my part, but I think I recall Intel using lawyers as a stall tactic until their Pentium II was launched - which was also part of why Intel went from socket to slot interface.

Shame that they aren't remembered for this achievement, Intel's mainline CPU offerings didn't offer similar integration until the 'Core i' series. Wonder how things would be if VIA didn't purchase them - would a different owner really been able to keep them competitive with AMD and Intel?...

It took me all these years to see nfs2 in glide for the first time. I grew up with it on pc and ps1. Man it looks wrong in glide

Integrated SB16 is much better that i thought it would have actual sound cards didn't have that very often

If it's about vintage CPUs, you have the best channel! Thank you once again! What happens, if you put this CPU in any other S7 Mainboard? Does it run at all there?

so is it the first x86 cpu to integrate the memory controller into the chip itself? intel's first integrated mem contoller was only in 2008 with the Nehalem uarch (i7 920 and such) and AMD's with the Athlon 64

My recollection is that cost kind of killed this CPU. This CPU with it's required MB was something like $30 cheaper then a Pentium MMX in a super socket 7 MB that had built in sound and graphics. If you were building your own, for that price the step up to a socket 7 and potentially a k6-2 was basically a no brainer.

Nice

Great video! How did you get Speedsys to run? I have a Comapq Presario 2232 desktop with a Cyrix Media GX CPU, on starting speedsys it just goes to a black screen, that is with MS-DOS 6.22 or Windows 95 command line, no memory managers. My machine is very limited, the CPU(not sure of the speed, but I believe it is 133MHz) is soldered to the board, it has only 1 8-bit ISA slot that contains a modem(it's very short and low also, so not much chance of using it for anything else). 16 MB of RAM is soldered to the motherboard and it has 2 72-pin SIMM slots, mine has 32 MB in total, using 2 MB for the graphics memory. The system does have some fantastic built in speakers though, a real rarity on desktop computers. It's a fun if very limited little box, but in 1997 when it was new I would rather have had a home build, that's for sure!

The Cyrix MediaGX is known to have powered some odd machines. In fact, pinball machines. It was the heart of the Bally/Williams PinBall2000 System, which was their last system designed, sadly with only 2 games made before the closure of the pinball division of WMS gaming (in, coincidentally, year 2000). It was chosen because it was more or less a kind of SOC with many features integrated, and the motherboards were tiny. The games were pinball/video games hybrids that run on an UNIX-like OS and made extensive use of this peculiar hardware. Nevertheless, with time, the Cyrix MediaGX and its associated proprietary motherboard was a serious concern for pinball machines collectors, as board/CPU failures were not uncommon due to bad cooling design inside the machines, and this architecture is indeed very rare, leaving way too many machines brain-dead. The system is hopefully now emulated, but a true original system is a must have.

Why does the gold package have Canada on top? Was this packaged at celestica or something?

This CPU would be great for playing old DOS games.

I forgot the MediaGX was an SOC. Wasn't this still manufactured at IBM despite NS owning Cyrix at that point?

If swithing off integrated sound and video - perfomance will be better?

Hello! How well does the Sound Blaster work under DOS, please?

I noticed that the FSB can be set to 33MHz, and the multiplier could be set to x10. Do you think it might be stable? And if so, would it be possible to run the tests again with those jumper settings?

It's kind of crazy to me that the only standard on these old boards that is still in common use (on desktops at least) is the 24 pin and friends and that might be on the way out too.

We really need a new x64 competitor to Intel and AMD, there needs to be at least 3 for any chance of prices to go down.

Surprised Quake 2 wasn't tested, should run fine on a rival Pentium CPU.

I'm sorry if I am posting prematurely.... but just in case. Just FYI... There are 3 versions of the MediaGX. You have Media GX, Media GXi, and Media GXm. In the first part of your video, the chip on your left is the GXi and the chip on your right is the GXm, which is the only MediaGX that supported MMX. I have a Compaq Presario 2200 which has the GXi at 180 Mhz. It's a very strange chip. It supports some Pentium Instruction Set's, but not all of them... so some software will give you an error "Pentium CPU Required" and some software would detect this as a 486 based CPU due to the lack of some instruction sets. For example, I was able to install Windows XP on an Intel Pentium at 60 Mhz and no issues whatsoever (just extremely slow). However, you cannot install Windows XP on the GXi, it gives you an errors about two required instruction sets missing. You can install Windows 2000, but then again, you can install that on a 486. I never owned the GXm version so maybe it will install Windows XP? I dunno... All I know is that I could install Windows XP on early Pentium's, but yet couldn't on the Cyrix I had. I still have that computer along with the monitor, keyboard, mouse, manual, etc. It was just a terrible CPU and I didn't even keep that computer a year before replacing it because it simply couldn't do anything I wanted... I was young and into games and of course I got tons of errors about not having 3D graphics, not having a Pentium, etc... and DOS support was terrible... so I mostly used it for internet and basic Windows 95 games.

There was a video calked, "can this old $10 chip teally edit video" it was reguarding a chio made by neither AMD or Intel, but was made spacificalky for editing video, back in the day, used by Hollywood, and $1000 when new. The video was made to disapear real fast. Does anyone know what chip it was?

The sexiest Cyrix. Because it's slow, the whole package, and cheap.

Very cool. But we have already 2021😁. 9:37

Back in the day I got half a dozen of these with boards for next to nothing from a local retailer going bankrupt. Why he didn't make money on them I don't know as I certainly did (about 3x what I paid IIRC) and had no trouble selling them. They weren't great machines but were a fine basis for cheap low end gaming or basic office PC especially as they had built in video and audio.

I found a machine with one of these a few years ago, unfortunately wasn't allowed to keep it as it was considered school property despite being well over 20 years old at the time

Did you disable the the level 2 cache on the Pentium MMX processor while testing? I think the Cyrix may beat the Intel without the level 2 cache. And the integrated video is not that bad. It would be much faster if it not used the main memory. This platform could have been much better if you ask me.

如果我没记错，25年前我初中时学校计算机室就有用Cyrix+集成显卡的电脑，玩游戏确实比不过intel的机器，不光是速度，有些游戏压根没法启动。

Only third iteration of MediaGX line had MMX support.

I didn't know they offered the MediaGX in a socketed form; I thought they were all soldered. I have a micro ATX board with a soldered MediaGX of some sort. I don't know its history and never used it much because it's a bit slow but if power consumption and heat dissipation are paramount concerns it would fit the bill well (in 1996 at least).

The Cyrix GX chips were all based on the Cyrix 5x86 core, so these chips are at a definite disadvantage when comparing to Pentium class chips. Cheers!

Back when the book that came with mainboards was useful.

Laut Wiki hätte der GX einen 33er FSB, der GXm aber schon 66MHz. Der FSB ist zwischen CPU und Northbridge, also nur innerhalb des Chips?

Oops, it's "3dfx", not "3fx"......

Is video integrated to CPU/soc or support chip? You said, that it is in CPU/soc and MoBo manual said it is in support chip

they used a BGA in the compaq 2200 180mhz

This is basically what modern(-ish) CPUs and MBs are but from 1997. CPU+PCH+LPC -like architecture.

Always worries me when you use a graphite pencil on a board