Pentium Performance from Cyrix's P166+

Selinda Chiquione

For the same price, Sys Technology offers two identical systems with a choice of CPUs--a Cyrix 133-MHz P166+ or a 166-MHz Pentium. We swapped the CPUs on the Asustek P/I-P55TP4XE motherboard in and out of one system and ran the BYTEmark 2.0 and BAPCO SYSmark benchmarks. Both systems came with 32 MB of 60-ns EDO RAM.

The BYTEmark is a CPU/FPU test, and the Cyrix-based system posted an integer score of 1.76, just 3 percent slower than the Pentium's 1.81 score. Its floating-point performance of 0.78 was 57 percent less than the Pentium's 1.81 score. If your work involves FPU-intensive applications, such as 3-D graphics, go with the Pentium. On BAPCO's SYSmark 95 for Windows 3.1, the Cyrix score of 541.62 lagged behind the Pen tium's 543.14 by 3 percent. However, its SYSmark NT score of 332 was faster than the Pentium's 307 by 8 percent.

The Cyrix P166+'s architecture includes a fully compatible x86 instruction set, two seven-stage pipelines (versus the Pentium's two five-stage integer pipelines), register renaming, multibranch prediction with speculative execution, and out-of-order execution. Depending on the applications that you run, the Cyrix 133-MHz P166+ delivers 166-MHz Pentium performance.

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Product Information

Performance C166+ with Cyrix P166+ or 
Performance P166T with 166-MHz Pentium 
..............................................$2669 with 16 MB of RAM
..............................................$3119 with 32 MB

Sys Technology, Inc.
Cypress, CA
Phone:     (800) 613-9963 or (714) 821-3900
Fax:       (714) 821-9592
Internet:  
http://www.systechnology.com

Circle 1009 on Inquiry Card.

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Same Price, Some Difference

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