Richardson, Texas-based Cyrix Corp insists it will launch its M1 Pentium-killer in June and claims it will beat both Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc in getting a sixth generation processor into customer systems. Cyrix says speed of OEM uptake will be enhanced by the fact that the M1 is pin-compatible with the Pentium chip, so computer manufacturers will not have to redesign motherboards to take advantage of the improved performance the M1 is said to offer. And as it runs existing iAPX-86 code in native mode, Cyrix says immediate performance boosts will be seen with existing software. The M1 that sampled early this month (CI No 2,614) will be shrunk down from the 20.3mm by 19.4mm, triple layer version Cyrix unveiled last winter (CI No 2,549), and the company says that by June it will have a three-layer, 0.65 micron CMOS microprocessor running at 100MHz, requiring 3.3V and dissipating 10W. The company says the original large die size made it easier to debug. By the end of the year the M1 will be a 15mm by 15mm, 0.65 micron, five-layer 120MHz chip, and in the first quarter of next year it will have a 0.5 micron, five-layer chip running at 133MHz or more, measuring 13mm by 13mm. Cyrix describes the M1 architecture as superscaler and parallel. Like the Pentium, it issues a maximum of two instructions per cycle. Cyrix says the most important features of the chip are its register renaming ability; data dependency removal; multi-branch prediction; speculative execution; out of order completion; and its superpipelined structure. And Cyrix claims that the M1 will be the first sixth generation chip with these features, says Cyrix. The company also complains that the suggestions made by an analyst earlier this year that its attempts to compete with Intel (CI No 2,584), are costing it dear. Erika Klauer, an analyst at Salomon Brothers in New York, had said that IBM Corp and SGS Thomson Microelectronics NV, Cyrix’ fab partners, were not as efficient at making chips as Intel, and so Cyrix was paying five times more per chip than its rival. Cyrix says this is quite obviously untrue, because if it really were paying that amount of money it would not have made the profits that it did. As for accusations that it does not have control over the fabrication process, Cyrix says its deal with IBM is such that it has invested $178m in the plant and in return for that Cyrix gets to buy the chips at cost.
