Cyrix' next generation

In our previous roundups of the Microprocessor Forum, we missed Cyrix' announcement. (It was not exactly well publicised, no nice slides to download :-(). Well it turns out they made two of them. On the technical front they presented Jalapeno, a dual-pipeline out-of-order 600Mhz core. Jalapeno will have an 11-stage pipeline, an on-chip 8-way associative 256 Kb L2 cache (giving it similar coverage to a traditional 512 Kb L2) and support for Rambus on the die (rather than in the chipset) boosting memory bandwidth to 3.2Gb/s. However Cyrix is focussing on the integrated low cost end of the market: MediaGX will be replaced by MXi (includes 3D graphics and the new Cayenne core) and later by M3 (even better 3D). The Cayenne core (basically an improved MII with 2 FPU/MMX pipes) will also make its way into a Socket 7 design. But Cyrix also made a lot of noise on the marketing side: Brian Halla (head of National which owns Cyrix) boldly predicted that next year companies will be giving PCs away for free, much as they give cell-phones away to make money on the services they can then provide. He expects PCs-on-a-chip to provide the next major cost reduction which will make this possible. Note that such a device would not need a CDROM drive, a large harddisk, or even a monitor (high cost items)