The actual representation of the MII/PR-433 comes by the PR-rating or Pentium equivalent rating. So a MII/PR433 would not necessarily mean that the CPU clock runs at 433MHz. This basically an indicator that means the performance of a MII would be equivalent to a Pentium CPU running at the same clock speed.

For instance, a Cyrix MII/433 actually operates at a 300MHz clock speed but supposedly performs at a performance level equal that of a Pentium 433. According to Cyrix, the x86 processor architecture has diverged a great deal resulting in variations in clock speed and number of instructions executed per clock cycle. It would not be fair to compare a Joshua processor that runs at 300 million clock cycles per second against another CPU running at 433 million clock cycles per second.

This is why the PR-rating has been used. These PR ratings by Cyrix were derived from scores of CPU performance under the Ziff-Davis Winstone suite.

Test Bed Setup

Performance numbers say it all. The following hardware was used to measure up the performance of the Cyrix MII/433 CPU. As we are comparing between a Socket 7 based CPU and Celeron is the Socket 370 base, 2 test bed setups had to be used. Most of the hardware was kept the same. The only difference being in CPU and motherboard.

MII Setup

- Cyrix MII/433GP CPU running at 300MHz under a normal clocked environment
- Asus P5SB "Super 7" Motherboard
- 96MB SDRAM running at 100MHz
- Quantum 8.4GB ATA/66 hard disk drive

Celeron Setup

- Intel Celeron 333 CPU
- Soltek 67KV Slot 1 Motherboard
- 96MB SDRAM running at 100MHz
- Quantum 8.4GB ATA/66 hard disk drive

We shall come to see whether or not the Cyrix MII/433 is a worthy competitor to the Celeron 333 CPU from Intel. Now on with the benchmarks...