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!
@@CPUGalaxy wow what a honor. You really do a great job. I’m at least enjoying your channel very much. And receiving recognition from also one my favorite RUclipsr is well deserved.
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 .
Yes. National Semiconductor sold the Media GX chip to AMD. This chip was used in the first One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) created by Negroponte in order to manufacture cheap computers. Also, this chip was used for some embedded systems (one of them was the 50x15 Personal Internet Communicator [PIC] manufactured to provide users with an appliance to consume content from Internet). This chip inspired AMD to create the SoC they called APU.
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.
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.
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.
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! :)
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 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 😀
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
@@Choralone422 yes, I immediately remembered of Via when seeing this video. HP integrated a Via C7-M chip into HP Mini PC, a netbook hat came with Windows Vista, oh man it was slow as hell, and have a hot sink problem that the soldering dies and you have to do BGA into the motherboard to it come back to live. I had bought one and it lasted less than a year. VIA, ECS and SiS was pretty common PC specs into my country (Brazil) during the 90s and 2000s era, losing its market share to Intel and other manufacturers during 2010s era. I was thankful for them for democratizing the access to the technology into a era that smartphones didn't exist, but they was slow as hell. Anyway, Cyrix has a special place into my heart, VIA continued part of Cyrix works, but could not beat Intel Atom technology, that also sucks, but were better than VIA C7-M.
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!!!
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.
The raw performance wasnt any better but you could overcome the cached memmory limit which on many boards is as low as 128Mb. In daily use the L2 cache made the system more snappy together with 512Mb RAM it was really nice. The K6-III was ultra rare, expensive and limited to 450Mhz. The big deal was when the K6-2+ in 180nm hit the road, cheap and able to run at 600Mhz together with 512Mb RAM an great working environement but its FPU was to slow for the upcoming DivX movie trend.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've had two DX2-66s that could hit 100 MHz without a problem -- one AMD and one Intel, with both coming in at around 75 MIPS. I'm lucky the motherboards and VLB cards could handle 50 MHz.
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!
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?
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
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...
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.
@@Neksus-M06 That makes sense since it has the MMX instruction set (and likely additional Pentium Instruction Sets) but I know you can't on the GX and GXi models which is a bit unfortunate.
@@michaelimlay5773 This cpu was meant for a specific use, thus I'm not that surprised it can't compete with way costlier cpus of the era. I've tried all Xp versions, no sp, sp1/2/3; sp3 is sluggish on this system. I had issues with Xp as it would crash explorer.exe when trying to access resources (browse files bsically and had to go through cmd to execute anything).
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?...
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.
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.
@Mr Guru pinball 2000 software is emulated and the thing is called nuCore. Albeit it's in legal limbo, unofficially it's still possible to get it working.
@Mr Guru From a technical standpoint, to emulate is to reproduce the working of an hardware, using another hardware, to the point of making the second said hardware natively runs the code compiled for the first one. The usage done with it has nothing to do with the emulation part of the process. And as far as I know the nuCore thing doesn't emulate the MediaGX at gate level, it's more a hack to make the original system runs on any X86 hardware. It's more a port than an emulation. By the way at the time I used to work on it , future pinball didn't allowed to be controlled by an emulator anyway.
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
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.
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.
Competition is always good for prices but also for pushing innovative solutions. In the case of Centaur and Cyrix being swallowed by VIA and integrated, but then let down is such an interesting story, which should be told one day more broadly.
So, maybe this is a choice for oldschool gaming platform, am i right? I mean, it already can emulate SB16, and good MIDI card can be added, Yamaha XG ISA version, for example. And Voodoo 2 in PCI.
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.
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?
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).
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
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?
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!
Thank you very much Adrian! Well, I‘m loving your channel as well. 😉
@@CPUGalaxy wow what a honor. You really do a great job. I’m at least enjoying your channel very much. And receiving recognition from also one my favorite RUclipsr is well deserved.
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 .
😢
😢
F
Well, at least you weren’t there.
@@user-nu5ib2ri9o I know , i was in the other room at the time sleeping .
This CPU/SoC design eventually evolved into the AMD Geode.
Ah I noticed the built in VGA reported itself as Geode -- so there is that connection.
Yes. National Semiconductor sold the Media GX chip to AMD. This chip was used in the first One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) created by Negroponte in order to manufacture cheap computers. Also, this chip was used for some embedded systems (one of them was the 50x15 Personal Internet Communicator [PIC] manufactured to provide users with an appliance to consume content from Internet). This chip inspired AMD to create the SoC they called APU.
Bought that board and a geode gx1... Maybe they like each other :)
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.
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.
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.
We take CPU integrated graphics granted these days, but this was quite ahead of its time.
Top video again! Waiting for the NexGen video 😀
I recently started collecting CPUs, and really enjoy your channel!!
Thank you. That is exactly what I want. To show here that collecting CPUs and old hardware is a great hobby. 👍🏻
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! :)
Very modern looking motherboard, the general layout and the ports is like something from a decade later
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.
Excellent video, thanks.
wiedermal ein sehr schönes Video! alles gute dir. freue mich wie immer auf mehr von dir!
Danke sehr 🙏🏻
Danke!
Wie steht es eigentlich um die Antworten in den Mails?
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 😀
One of my favourite retro channels without a doubt. Never even knew that a CPU like this existed. :)
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
Could you tell more?
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!
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.
Good to see this review. I tried to find this before and it is true that the motherboards are very hard to get :/
For the time Cyrix was really pushing more integration and doing some really innovative stuff. I never did get my hands on this CPU.
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.
no. from Carinthia 😉
this is actually REALLY interesting. proper system integration on a very old motherboard/cpu combo
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.
I am glad that you liked the video and that it helped you.☺️. Thanks for visiting my channel.
Cool to see those Cyrix chips, didnt know they were owned by national semiconductors.
They were for a couple of years in the late 90's and then Cyrix was sold to VIA around 2000.
@@Choralone422 yes, I immediately remembered of Via when seeing this video. HP integrated a Via C7-M chip into HP Mini PC, a netbook hat came with Windows Vista, oh man it was slow as hell, and have a hot sink problem that the soldering dies and you have to do BGA into the motherboard to it come back to live. I had bought one and it lasted less than a year.
VIA, ECS and SiS was pretty common PC specs into my country (Brazil) during the 90s and 2000s era, losing its market share to Intel and other manufacturers during 2010s era. I was thankful for them for democratizing the access to the technology into a era that smartphones didn't exist, but they was slow as hell. Anyway, Cyrix has a special place into my heart, VIA continued part of Cyrix works, but could not beat Intel Atom technology, that also sucks, but were better than VIA C7-M.
@@eduardomozart less than a year, same here, in the UK.
Do you have any Transmeta Procs?
And don't forget IDT Winchip and Rise's mP6 chips.
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!!!
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.
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.
definitely! I have some powerful super socket 7 boards and will cover K2, K3 and K3+ 👍🏻
The raw performance wasnt any better but you could overcome the cached memmory limit which on many boards is as low as 128Mb. In daily use the L2 cache made the system more snappy together with 512Mb RAM it was really nice. The K6-III was ultra rare, expensive and limited to 450Mhz. The big deal was when the K6-2+ in 180nm hit the road, cheap and able to run at 600Mhz together with 512Mb RAM an great working environement but its FPU was to slow for the upcoming DivX movie trend.
Btw Phil made an video already ruclips.net/video/A2Oymnq5DEQ/видео.html
@@creiser77 "K6-III" oh I had no idea I purchased a super rare system way back then. It wasn't expensive though since I got it when it first came out.
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.
This is fun, what was a low end budget solutions are 20-30 years later "oddities for collectors" :)
And as always, excellent video!
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?
the soundcard is included on the mainboard in this silver chip.
Great video! Thanks for sharing this. I did not know about this CPU at all. Very interesting.
It would be interesting to know more about the SB16 compatibility and the MPU-401 interface.
I recall at the time working in retail selling computers that we had Packard Bell computers with these CPUs featured.
Thank you for the good memories.
Very interesting video, I didn't know of the existence of this Cpu (SOC)!
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.
I wonder why they uses 4x86 architecture instead of 6x86 architecture. Maybe because of the thermal limitations / for low power consumption.
Hi peter, good job!
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.
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.
Good call.
with a custom made 3d printed case you could make a nice dos gaming "console"! the cpu king with another hit video :)
Amazon has a flat new retro M/ATX beige desktop case, 70 USD
UK company I think.
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!
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.
Aaahh, NFSIISE, fond memories
Very nice and interesting video! Isn't this Cyrix CPU considered as a 486 class CPU? (with some extensions of course)
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.
I was always curious about the Cyrix cpus
best used by OEMs, slow, and needed good cooling which wasn't in vogue wIth many home builders cIrca 2000.
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.
Oh yeah, some 3dfx !
I used to have one of these, transformed doom unreal etc..
this would be a good candidate for a diy project since it's a SOC
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.
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.
compare early and late Socket 7 motherboards.
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.
Integrated SB16 is much better that i thought it would have actual sound cards didn't have that very often
Keep going!!
Excelent source of info!!!
Didn't know they pushed the 5x86 to those freqiencies, interesting!
Yea you could even push the AMD DX4 series pretty far also. Very close to Pentium performance with the right tweaks.
I've had two DX2-66s that could hit 100 MHz without a problem -- one AMD and one Intel, with both coming in at around 75 MIPS. I'm lucky the motherboards and VLB cards could handle 50 MHz.
I remember upgrading from a p1 133 non mmx to a pr233+. I was really disapointed.
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!
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?
thank you! no. it does not run at all. its also not pin compatible.
@@CPUGalaxy Aha, I see, thank you!
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
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...
I forgot the MediaGX was an SOC. Wasn't this still manufactured at IBM despite NS owning Cyrix at that point?
Great video. Your BIOS was set to 2020 though!
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
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.
Yes, you can install Win Xp on a Gxm.
@@Neksus-M06 That makes sense since it has the MMX instruction set (and likely additional Pentium Instruction Sets) but I know you can't on the GX and GXi models which is a bit unfortunate.
@@michaelimlay5773 This cpu was meant for a specific use, thus I'm not that surprised it can't compete with way costlier cpus of the era.
I've tried all Xp versions, no sp, sp1/2/3; sp3 is sluggish on this system. I had issues with Xp as it would crash explorer.exe when trying to access resources (browse files bsically and had to go through cmd to execute anything).
This is basically what modern(-ish) CPUs and MBs are but from 1997. CPU+PCH+LPC -like architecture.
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?...
Only third iteration of MediaGX line had MMX support.
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.
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.
@Mr Guru pinball 2000 software is emulated and the thing is called nuCore. Albeit it's in legal limbo, unofficially it's still possible to get it working.
@Mr Guru it makes real games work.
@Mr Guru From a technical standpoint, to emulate is to reproduce the working of an hardware, using another hardware, to the point of making the second said hardware natively runs the code compiled for the first one. The usage done with it has nothing to do with the emulation part of the process.
And as far as I know the nuCore thing doesn't emulate the MediaGX at gate level, it's more a hack to make the original system runs on any X86 hardware. It's more a port than an emulation.
By the way at the time I used to work on it , future pinball didn't allowed to be controlled by an emulator anyway.
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
The sexiest Cyrix. Because it's slow, the whole package, and cheap.
I had a MediaGX 233 laptop, what a terrible processor. About the same performance as a P133. Piece of crap.
@@evoblade2000 Compaq?
That's supper cool and interesting!
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.
yeah, i tried also with disabled L2 on the pentium mmx. but still it was much faster.
This CPU would be great for playing old DOS games.
Why does the gold package have Canada on top? Was this packaged at celestica or something?
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.
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.
I agree. A duopoly isn't going to cut it for us consumers.
Still, VIA is there, competing with the Cyrix-inherited technology... But with a tiny market share.
Competition is always good for prices but also for pushing innovative solutions. In the case of Centaur and Cyrix being swallowed by VIA and integrated, but then let down is such an interesting story, which should be told one day more broadly.
Very cool. But we have already 2021😁. 9:37
lol. yeah, i did not set it.
So, maybe this is a choice for oldschool gaming platform, am i right? I mean, it already can emulate SB16, and good MIDI card can be added, Yamaha XG ISA version, for example. And Voodoo 2 in PCI.
yeah, but the cpu is too weak to handle a voodoo 2 properly.
@@CPUGalaxy i heard cpu won't see any L2 cache on m/b. Anyway, i'm interested only in old games, maybe Unreal and QII engines max.
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。
they used a BGA in the compaq 2200 180mhz
Hey, do you have any Transmeta CPU?
yeah, i have some. 🙃
@@CPUGalaxy you do realize you need to make a video on them, like immediately? :D
Very interested in those!
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.
Always worries me when you use a graphite pencil on a board
If swithing off integrated sound and video - perfomance will be better?
Oops, it's "3dfx", not "3fx"......
thanks for the hint. I corrected the typo already. 👍🏻
Hello! How well does the Sound Blaster work under DOS, please?
Surprised Quake 2 wasn't tested, should run fine on a rival Pentium CPU.
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
video is in the cpu, the support chip contains some mpg acceleration
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?
Yesss, very nice
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).
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
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?
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?
ja. schaut so aus. das hat mich auch etwas verwirrt als ich das video gedreht habe.
Back when the book that came with mainboards was useful.