Performance

Q. Under what conditions does the Winchip’s performance excel?

A. The Winchip is most comfortable being utilized under Windows95 doing business applications (in fact it was specifically optimized for this OS). It’s a great chip for doing typical data entry stuff and internet browsing. The benchmarks for business apps are typically very similar to a K6 at a given clock speed.

Q. Under what conditions is the Winchip’s performance taxed?

A. Anything requiring FPU performance is going to lag on the Winchip. Due to some tradeoffs in the design, the FPU core was not given very high priority. This should be improved in the next version of the Winchip, the C6+. Windows NT is not a good candidate operating system either.

Q. Why does the Winchip vary is speed when running different applications?

A. The big tradeoffs that got the main die of the Winchip so small, also affects the performance of different applications. The Winchip implements very specific design features (in hardware) to reduce the number of clocks for heavily used instructions. This means that some determination was made about what instructions were common and these were given priority in the hardware design. Other instructions considered not as common are often times implemented in microcode and not hardware. This makes performance difficult to predict. All this tuning is why the Winchip is primarily thought of as a Windows95 (or 98) processor.