This may be old news to the group, so I apologize in advance.
The October 1997 issue of Byte features a nice article on the C6 chip on pages 51-52: "Keeping It Simple. A Pentium-class microprocessor rebels against current design trends with a vatly simplified microachitecture." By Tom Halfhill
The article does a good job explaining the chip design to non-engineers -- particularly how the chip manages to perform like a Pentium without all the fancy stuff (superscalar pipelines, out-of order execution, branch prediction, etc.)
After reading the article, I believe that Glenn Henry's C6 is going to make waves in the industry.
With today's clock speeds and transistor densities, why bother with all the on-chip "software" and overhead?
The C6 is like "nutrasweet": Full taste (speed), but no calories (low cost, power, space).
On news of the first C6 design win, I think IDTI is a strong buy, and INTC is a near term short.
[Longer term, I see no reason why Intel couldn't replicate the simple elegance of the C6 design and defend the majority of it's market share in "low end" processors, although at significantly lower profits per chip]
With the K6, M2, and now the C6, it seems a new type of "Microprocessor Revolution" has begun!
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