The WinChip series was a low-power Socket 7-based x86 processor designed by Centaur Technology and marketed by its parent company IDT.
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 experience from the RISC processor market, created a small and electrically efficient processor. In fact, Winchip had much in common with the 80486, because of its single pipeline, in-order execution, and CISC architecture. It was of much simpler design than that of its competition, such as AMD K5/K6 and Intel Pentium II, which were based on superscalar RISC x86 decoder approaches with advanced instruction reordering (out of order execution) and multiple pipelines.
WinChip was, in general, designed to perform well with popular applications that didn't do much (if any) floating point calculations. This included operating systems of 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 2A added fractional multipliers and adopted a 100 MHz front side bus to improve memory access and L2 cache performance. It also adopted the performance rating concept, similar to how AMD and Cyrix marketed their processors. This method of specifying processor performance helped consumers understand where the WinChip's performance fit in against Intel's competing products. Another revision (2B) was also planned, with a die shrink to 0.25 μm, but was shipped in limited numbers. A third WinChip was planned as well, this one receiving a doubled L1 cache, but that CPU never made it to market.
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 initially branded processors as "Cyrix," the company initially used technology similar to WinChip with its Cyrix III line.
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 experience from the RISC processor market, created a small and electrically efficient processor. In fact, Winchip had much in common with the 80486, because of its single pipeline, in-order execution, and CISC architecture. It was of much simpler design than that of its competition, such as AMD K5/K6 and Intel Pentium II, which were based on superscalar RISC x86 decoder approaches with advanced instruction reordering (out of order execution) and multiple pipelines.
WinChip was, in general, designed to perform well with popular applications that didn't do much (if any) floating point calculations. This included operating systems of 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 2A added fractional multipliers and adopted a 100 MHz front side bus to improve memory access and L2 cache performance. It also adopted the performance rating concept, similar to how AMD and Cyrix marketed their processors. This method of specifying processor performance helped consumers understand where the WinChip's performance fit in against Intel's competing products. Another revision (2B) was also planned, with a die shrink to 0.25 μm, but was shipped in limited numbers. A third WinChip was planned as well, this one receiving a doubled L1 cache, but that CPU never made it to market.
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 initially branded processors as "Cyrix," the company initially used technology similar to WinChip with its Cyrix III line.