Steve Tobak, worldwide marketing manager of the Cyrix subsidiary of National Semiconductor, said today that the company was set to make acquisitions in the software business. That forms part of its dual strategy to focus on both CPU sales and sales of information appliances, he explained. At the same time, he said that Cyrix had dropped its Jedi and Jalapeno codenames for future processors and replaced them with Gobi for Jedi and Mojave for Jalapeno. "You can't trademark a desert," he said. Intel knows you can't trademark rivers or planets." Tobak said: "We've reorganised into two separate businesses. The information appliance leverages off the PC side but that will be entirely business solutions. The Media GX is the basis for them. Cyrix was showing its MII-366/100 MHz chip on its CeBIT stand, which Tobak said was now shipping in volume. The MII-400/100 will ship later in the quarter and the MII-433, also demoed on the stand, will ship in Q3, he said. He said that the Cyrix software group in Colorado was working on developing multimedia solutions including MPEG in software. "We'll probably see some acquisitions on the software side complementary to our competence," he revealed. He would not directly answer whether Cyrix had a Socket 370 solution in the offing, or whether it will be part of the MII-433/100 platform. But he did say: "No one is socket seven for ever." ®