IDT Winchip C6 vs Cyrix 686MX

"Centaur Hauls" as the cpu ID shows, does not quite live up to the name, although I am not sure how fast a Centaur really is. Anyway this is a look at a weak socket 7 chip with no real surprises to speak of. 32k+32k level 1 cache, and a single stage pipeline with MMX instructions. The other fun fact about these chips is they do not have " point multipliers " so any clock speed multiplier with a .5 simply does not work. Future testing of this chip under a Windows environment with some MMX enhanced games will be done at some point. There is sure more to the lack of performance than a weaker fpu, and as Microscope shows, the FPU is really just slightly under the K6 and Cyrix. Integer performance really sucks for a 200MHz socket 7 CPU, though I think the Intel chip was in the 150K ins/sec where as this chip is 100K ins/sec. Benchmarking wise the socket 7 chips trade places with one another, but this one seems to remain at the bottom on all benchmarks compared to the other socket 7 offerings. Benchmarking with quake is only done because it is an easy one to run, and this was the test everyone seemed to use back in the day. Problem though is it is a bit unfair in my humble opinion due to the special optimizations done to the game specific for Intel processors. This is one of the many examples of why Intel got the name ChipZilla. Same held true though for AMD with the K6-2/3 era and their 3DNOW!, games that took advantage of 3DNOW! usually stayed on par with the Pentium 2, or beat it by a healthy amount.

As a side note, 2 more Socket 7 processors exist, the Winchip 2 and Winchip 3. I have not seen either of these for sale in " the wild " at the moment, but I will keep my eye out, because there were improvements made with these later revisions which might be enough to compete with Cyrix and AMD. Certainly there had to be a good reason for Via to go with something called "Centaur Hauls" over "CyrixInstead" and maybe the Winchip 3 was indeed better than the Cyrix MII or unreleased MIII core.