The WinChip series is a discontinued low-power Socket 7 -based x86 processor that was designed by Centaur Technology and marketed by its parent company IDT .
6-852: The design of the WinChip was quite different from other processors of the time. Instead of a large gate count and die area, IDT, using its experience from the RISC processor market, created a small and electrically efficient processor similar to the 80486 , because of its single pipeline and in-order execution microarchitecture . It was of much simpler design than its Socket 7 competitors, such as AMD K5 / K6 , which were superscalar and based on dynamic translation to buffered micro-operations with advanced instruction reordering ( out of order execution ). WinChip was, in general, designed to perform well with popular applications that did few floating point calculations, if any. This included operating systems of
12-679: A die shrink to 0.25 Ξm, but was only shipped in limited numbers. A third model, the WinChip 3, was planned as well. This was meant to receive a doubled L1 cache, but the W3 CPU never made it to market. Although the small die size and low power-usage made the processor notably inexpensive to manufacture, it never gained much market share. WinChip C6 was a competitor to the Intel Pentium and Pentium MMX , Cyrix 6x86 , and AMD K5/K6. It performed adequately, but only in applications that used little floating point math. Its floating point performance
18-425: The number of logic gates built with transistors and other electronic devices, that are needed to implement a design. Even with today's processor technology providing what was formerly considered impossible numbers of gates in a single chip, gate counts remain one of the most important overall factors in the end price of a chip. Designs with fewer gates will typically cost less, and for this reason gate count remains
24-416: The only non-AMD CPU on Socket 7 to support 3DNow! instructions. WinChip 2A added fractional multipliers and adopted a 100 MHz front side bus to improve memory access and L2 cache performance. It also adopted a performance rating nomenclature instead of reporting the real clock speed, similar to contemporary AMD and Cyrix processors. Another revision, the WinChip 2B, was also planned. This featured
30-485: The time and the majority of software used in businesses. It was also designed to be a drop-in replacement for the more complex, and thus more expensive, processors it was competing with. This allowed IDT/Centaur to take advantage of an established system platform (Intel's Socket 7 ). WinChip 2, an update of C6, retained the simple in-order execution pipeline of its predecessor, but added dual MMX/3DNow! processing units that could operate in superscalar execution. This made it
36-733: Was simply well below that of the Pentium and K6, being even slower than the Cyrix 6x86. The industry's move away from Socket 7 and the release of the Intel Celeron processor signalled the end of the WinChip. In 1999, the Centaur Technology division of IDT was sold to VIA . Although VIA branded the processors as "Cyrix", the company initially used technology similar to the WinChip in its Cyrix III line. Gate count In microprocessor design, gate count refers to
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