This article is more than 1 year old

Centaur-IDT outlines chip plans

WinChip 2 and 2-3D to arrive in volume later this year

A year ago From The Register, 20 May 1998 (last year) IDT has outlined its product roadmap for its WinChip range of microprocessors, aimed at capturing the entry level x.86 compatible market. Glenn Henry, senior VP of IDT and its design subsidiary Centaur, showed versions of the chips at the PC Tech Forum in the US, which incorporate AMD's 3DNow! technology. Earlier this year, Cyrix, AMD and IDT said they would cooperate on their own answer to Intel's MMX 3D strategy. Henry said that IDT had started sampling its WinChip 2 and WinChip 2-3D for both the desktop and notebook markets. The socket seven based chips will start at speeds of 266MHz but will move to 300MHz later this year. According to IDT, the WinChip2 family will now support Super7 motherboards, AMD's proposed design which has support from a number of independent chipset vendors. The Super7 boards come with support for 100MHz buses and AGP support, as well as a pipelined floating point unit, offering faster games performance. Henry said that future IDT chips will have larger first level caches and reach speeds of up to 600MHz. Its WinChip 3 will use super pipelining technology to reach those speeds. The processors are fairly and squarely aimed at the entry level market. According to IDT, the WinChip 2 and WinChip 2-3D will be available in volume later this year. Like its partners AMD and Cyrix, IDT has signed a foundry agreement with IBM Microelectronics to produce the CPUs in volume. IDT already produces a WinChip product and has plans to grow its distribution channel which in Europe at least is still in its early stages. ®

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