*BSD News Article 86644


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From: jackson@replicant.csci.unt.edu (Bruce Jackson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Cyrix P166+ CPU patch - is it available?
Date: 17 Jan 1997 04:38:17 GMT
Organization: University of North Texas, Denton
Lines: 18
Message-ID: <5bmvnp$5dj@hermes.acs.unt.edu>
References: <Pine.SUN.3.93-heb-2.07.970116185536.7861A-100000@actcom.co.il> <5bmd7a$ni9@darkstar.ucsc.edu>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33938

In article <5bmd7a$ni9@darkstar.ucsc.edu>,
Thomas Gunnar Sparks <tgs@cats.ucsc.edu> wrote:

> From what I understand, Cyrix has crappy math coprocessing Why would
> anyone buy one? other than its cheap I guess..

For the jobs I run there is little floating point math.  For me a
Cyrix CPU was both cheaper and faster than a Pentium.  Under FreeBSD
it does probe as a '486 but it still performs great.  I built a kernel
that would identify the CPU as a Pentium class CPU but it crashed
while booting with a supervisor violation.  Perhaps in the future
FreeBSD will better support the 6x86 CPU's but for the time being it
does seem like a good choice to me.


--
 Bruce Jackson    b.a.jackson@ieee.org
 http://replicant.csci.unt.edu/~jackson/