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To: Kenith Lee who wrote (5941)5/2/1998 7:58:00 PM
From: Francis Chow  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 6843
 
Centaur sports AMD's bus, 3-D in WinChip CPU

May 04, 1998, TechWeb News

Centaur sports AMD's bus, 3-D in WinChip CPU
By Rick Boyd-merritt

Austin, Texas - Centaur Technology has started to sample a new version of
its WinChip C6 Pentium-clone processor. The chip uses the floating-point
instruction-set enhancements for 3-D graphics as well as the 100-MHz Super
7 processor bus, which is defined by and licensed from Advanced Micro
Devices, and geared to compete with Intel's MMX instruction-set extensions
and 100-MHz processor bus of the Pentium II.

Centaur plans to officially announce in late May its new version of the C6 as
the WinChip 2. The chip should hit volume production by early July, just a
few weeks after AMD's own processor using the new instructions and
100-MHz bus is slated to hit volume production. The 300-MHz AMD K6-2
will officially roll out on May 28.

Turning point

Centaur's WinChip 2 is being made in a 0.35-micron process in which it is
expected to hit speeds of 240 to 266 MHz and be priced at less than $100.

Beyond adopting AMD's bus and instruction-set technologies, the WinChip 2
also sports a new floating-point unit, a second MMX pipeline and a four-way
set-associative data cache. Branch prediction has also been added to the
processor. "We did a lot of fine-tuning of the initial design," said G. Glenn
Henry, president of Centaur.

Henry said this year could be a crucial turning point for clone X86 chip
makers in their struggles to penetrate the consumer-PC market. "The next six
months are very important," said Henry. "AMD now has a 100-MHz
systems bus and 3-D instruction-set extensions. The question is will good
technology or Intel's marketing win. We will have to wait and see."

A PC product manager for Hewlett-Packard last week noted the company
had discontinued its first sub-$1,000 business system using an AMD
processor and launched in its place a system using the new Intel Celeron chip,
even though that CPU has received relatively poor benchmarks. HP
concluded that its AMD-based system sold poorly because business buyers
are reluctant to specify systems without an Intel processor.

Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc.