JUNE LAUNCH FOR M1 SAYS CYRIX, PROMISING IMMEDIATE PERFORMANCE BOOST

(April 7th 1995) Cyrix Corp (Richardson, Texas) 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 because 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 will be shrunk down from the 20.3mm
x 19.4mm, triple-layer version Cyrix unveiled last winter. 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 x 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 x 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.

The company refutes suggestions by an analyst earlier this year that its
attempts to compete with Intel are costing it dear. Erika Klauer, an
analyst at Salomon Brothers in New York, said IBM and SGS Thomson
Microelectronics NV, Cyrix' fab partners, were not as efficient at
making chips as Intel, so Cyrix was paying five times more per chip than
its rival. Cyrix says this is obviously untrue - if it really was paying
that amount of money it would not have made the profits it did. As for
accusations that it does not have control over the fabrication process,
Cyrix says that under its deal with IBM, it has invested $178m in the
plant and in return gets to buy the chips at cost.