Design 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).
Use WinChip was, in general, designed to perform well with popular applications that did few floating point calculations, if any. 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).
Later developments 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. 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 a die shrink to 0.25 μm, 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. ==Decline==