WINCHIP

7/10/99

Winchip -- Winchips are inexpensive Pentium clones manufactured by Integrated Design Technology (IDT) for use in low end personal computers. The Winchip C6 CPU was introduced in at 200MHz in May 1997. It is a socket 7 (321 pin PGA) CPU manufactured to operate at user selectable 3.3v or 3.52v. It is purportedly fully Pentium Compatible and supports MMX extensions. No significant software problems have been reported with the Winchips. The claim to full Pentium compatibility may be accurate. The Winchip C6 is a 5.4million transistor 0.35micron chip. Available speeds are 180, 200 and 225MHz with the CPU running at 3X the bus speed. A 240MHz x4 chip is also available. The cache is 64K. Active heat removal -- heat sink and fan -- is required.

A 6,000,000 transistor WinChip 2 CPU, Socket 7/Super-Socket 7, was announced in May 1998 running at 200 (x3), 233 (x3.5) and 266 (x2.33) 3.3v or 3.52v. It supports AMD 3D Now! technology, has improved floating point performance, and supports 100Mhz bus speeds. 2.5x and 2.66x multipliers were added. Multiplier settings are compatible with the AMD K6 except that the AMD 5x setup is used to set 2.33x on the Winchip and 5.5x is used to set 2.66x on the Winchip.

To further complicate things, the Winchips are P-rated. e.g. the Winchip 266 benchmarks roughly the same as Cyrix or Intel 266MHz CPUs but are actually specified to run at 2.33x 100MHz = 233MHz.

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