One Year Ago: Cyrix to announce M2 next week

Cyrix is expected to make the formal announcement of its M2 processor next week.

Sources said the Texan chip firm will announce details of the chip the day before Computex, the Taipei, Taiwan exhibition aimed at an OEM audience, which kicks off June 3. The part will compete with Intel's Pentium II and AMD's K6 lines.

However, rival AMD said today that Cyrix may be looking for crumbs when it goes searching for PC vendors willing to give the M2 a home. "I hope they do well because anything that breaks up the Intel dominance is good for everybody," said Richard Baker, European marketing manager for PC products at AMD. "But we've snaffled up most of the reasonable-sized vendors and [vendors] don't want a second non-Intel supplier. [Cyrix is] hitting the same speed grades as us and having both us and them in PC ranges would lead to confusion."

AMD currently supplies its K6 to Digital, Elonex and Evesham Micros and is rumoured to be close to completing deals with Acer, Hewlett-Packard and Vobis.