IDT's chip roadmap surely rolleth

Jonathan Hou, at PC One seems to have a knack of getting these pesky chip vendors to talk to him. We can assure you, they are pesky. We're still trying to get a date with the marketeers at AMD so they can tell us all about the K6-III. (Story: AMD to call K6-3 the K6-III) Jonathan's recently managed to secure an interview with IDT-Centaur, makers of the fabled WinChip x.86 clone chip and in the process winkled some good information out of them. They've been keeping very quiet for the last few months, although now and again they've raised their head over the parapet. Here at The Register we talked to them just before Yule and they promised to get back to us early New Year, but not a peep out of them so far... According to the unnamed exec Hou talked to, IDT has now fixed the 3DNow! bug in its WinChip 2 part, IDT has a measly one per cent market share, but hopes to do better in the future. But IDT thinks it will knock spots off Rise and have better performance and pricing than the mP6 or the mP6-II. IDT chips up to WinChip 4 will support Super 7, and the company claims clock speeds will ramp during the course of this year, with the WinChip 4 reaching 500MHz in one year's time. IBM is foundrying its WinChip 4, but won't get caught in the same nasty mess as Cyrix. The company is sticking to its last, and attempting to sell chips into the so-called "white box" market, but will try and sell its mobile offerings to Tier One players, because it will be so inexpensive. WinChip 3 will come out in August and WinChip 4 in Q4 1999, according to IDT. Both parts will use .25 micron technology. Jonathan has dug out quite a bit more info than this summary. Check out his site for the full monty. ®