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Cyrix readies sealed-case PC blitz

Cyrix shifts its PC-building strategy into high gear with sealed-case and thin-client boxes.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
Cyrix (CYRX) is planning a massive sealed-case, thin-client PC blitz in the coming months including a Pentium-class consumer box which will sell in the $500 to $1,000 range this December.

Cyrix will kick off its product assault with its "black box"--a VCR-sized, sealed-case, consumer PC--that includes a 133-MHz Pentium-class processor based on Cyrix's GX processor, 16MB of RAM, a large hard disk drive (likely to be in the 1GB range), and Microsoft Windows 95, sources close to the company say.

Sources say the system will be built to conform to Simply Interactive PC (SIPC) guidelines, a sealed-case PC standard promoted by Microsoft, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and others.

Sealed-case PCs will come in a number of forms but are primarily intended as the quintessential easy-to-use, plug-and-play PCs. The Cyrix PC will also include features like a wireless keyboard, according to the sources.

For manufacture of the computer, Cyrix will contract with Asian-based companies, which will then supply the boxes to Cyrix and other PC vendors, said sources.

Compaq may also use the GX processor in a sub-$1000 consumer PC design, said sources.

Cyrix will follow this later with a thin-client PC design, also based on SIPC, for business customers which runs Windows NT, the sources said.