What is the Winchip s design objective?
A. The Winchip is the product of a sophisticated design effort that attempted to re-establish what s necessary and important in a processor design. Coming on the heels of the Intel, AMD and Cyrix CPUs, IDT wanted to rethink the tradeoffs of performance, cost and complexity. The Winchip s claim to fame is to carefully cut the right corners in the design in an attempt to maintain reasonable performance, while simultaneously making the chip less complex. By minimizing the complexity, the size of the circuit can be kept small, providing more die per wafer, greater yields and ultimately cooler and cheaper parts.
