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The IDT WinChip Processor
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 | Initial discarded C6
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Designed by Centaur Technologies and manufactured by Integrated Device Technologies, the WinChip was introduced in 1997 as an alternative to the Pentium MMX processor. The WinChip has a much simpler design than the Pentium and therefore the die is 27% smaller than the Pentium's and 46% smaller than AMD's K5. It only uses a single pipeline for example, processing each instruction one at a time as quickly as possible instead of executing multiple instructions per clock cycle. To compete with Intel and AMD in speed comparison Centaur doubled the L1 cache size to 32KB for instructions and 32KB for data. This made the WinChip about as fast as a Pentium MMX or a K5 with same clock frequency.
While the processor was cheap it never gained much market share and in 1999 the Centaur Technology division of IDT was sold to VIA. Although VIA continued to use the Cyrix name initially, it uses the WinChip technology in its Cyrix III and VIA C3 processor lines.
References:
WinChip C6 at Tom's Hardware
WinChip Data Sheets |
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