Talk:WinChip

Socket 5

The winchip's were a socket5 chip ...single voltage rail..

Any socket 7 can run a socket 5 chip , but who would actually put a winchip in where a better chip from AMD or cyrix was available at a similar price ?

The price of the winchip made it only sensible as an upgrade to a socket 5 motherboard - Other manufacturers had quit making anything socket 5 compatible.

202.92.40.202 (talk) 02:06, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

My sole WinChip was a 225 Mhz example that needed a 75 Mhz (or MT/s) Front side bus, what you do not encounter on a socket 5 motherboard. And not on that many Socket 7 motherboard either. --Dirk P Broer (talk) 19:04, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Article direction

The Winchip continued to be developed by VIA as the Cyrix III, and then for some bizarre reason, for about the last 6 months it was on sale, was marketed as the C3. I've previously suggested that was because the real C3 chip was extensively delayed, and VIA management felt like they needed a new product, as VIA was falling behind AMD and Intel badly at the time. They didn't have it, so they introduced a new marketing term, for a relatively trivial process shrink, and tried to make it look like they had a new chip.

So when the new chip finally arrived (what we think of as the C3/C7), there was little to no launch, bizzarely. Very strange, but as I've said before, don't blame me for VIA's messed up marketing. The design team in Texas, doesn't seem to talk to the marketing team in Taiwan. Thats VIA for you.

Now, as I've pointed out MANY, MANY times, the entire IT section is group by cores. Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, ATI, etc ALL WORK THIS WAY. Go ahead, Check for yourself. Its done that way, because its the most logical format. So following this agreed and widely accepted format, all the iterations of the WINCHIP core, including the development work done under VIA's ownership, should be on the same page.

Now it may be that in the end, I admit, the VIA pages have to be done differently to the rest of the IT section, because no-one can get their heads round the idea that VIA's marketing materials do not match their products. Thats too complex a thought for casual WIKI readers to understand. So we have to 'dumb it down' for people to be able to understand it, since the facts are too complex.So one compromise I can suggest, is that the section on the WINCHIP at VIA be moved to a new dedicated CYRIX 3 page.

What I object to here, is the deletion of content I've written, which is technically accurate, and the failure to move it anywhere. I just don't think it acceptable to delete good quality content for no reason. Move it to the talk page, if you must, create another page for it, but deletion is definitely out of line.

Finally, let us examine some of the work of this editor Stickedy. He hacked about my VIA pages, and replaced good quality English, with work like the following:

• 'VIA Technologies launched its first processor as Cyrix III ' - off topic, its C3 page!
• 'and it was a bit of an oddity' - slang English
• 'Der Samuel core' - his content apparently sourced from a Google translation of the German WIKI!
• 'embedded marketplaces - should be singular
• 'VIA's naming policy is very confusing at all' - grammatically broken English
• 'I recently do some splitting and merging and cleaned up' - mixed tenses
• 'there are some informations left which need to be added' - wrong plural

So far as I can tell, much of his 'contributions' come from putting WIKIPEDIA German through google translation. Why is a man who can not write coherent grammatical English, doing lecturing someone such as myself who holds a masters? Let me put it this way, if Stickedy's English is this bad, what confidence can that give anyone else, he has his facts straight? Timharwoodx 18:07, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'll let Stickedy defend himself if he'd like to. He has responded to your complaints regarding his grammar before. (Talk:VIA_C3#Does_this_editor_speak_English.3F). I'm not sure if he's a native English speaker.

Regarding cores, well I did author about 85% of the Radeon articles and some of the NV work. Still, you'll see that especially with NVIDIA, the articles are by product name and don't have huge amounts of information about a previous generation even if they are related. With ATI, I decided to go by cores as a generational approach because of how they take a high-end chip and chop it up into their mid and low-range parts.

Take note too that this is easily referenced information that can be proven. That is not the case with WinChip. We don't truly know how similar Cyrix III is to WinChip, especially if it's based on a hypothetical, unreleased WinChip 3 or 4. That WinChip is supposedly used later on as a Cyrix III has nothing to do with the actual, released WinChip line. WinChip was a dead product. If they decided to make use of their "WinChip" R&D for VIA's product line, that doesn't mean it is still "WinChip". WinChip 3 and 4 don't actually exist and, as such, could be said to have nothing to do with the WinChip product at all.

If you want to make a Cyrix III article, I suppose that might be worthwhile. But, honestly, it wasn't really a rousing success and wasn't around very long. Still, considering the intrigue regarding the Cyrix and Centaur cores, it might be worth doing. The problem is there is so little information out there that actually building up a decent amount of content would be tough.

By the way, I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but I did relocate your WinChip work to the C3 page. There is a reference to the VIA C3's relationship to WinChip at the end of the WinChip content. With your C3 content, the WinChip page ends up having more content about VIA's CPUs than the released WinChip hardware. Please stop reverting what is in actuality mostly content written by me anyway. I have reworked my previous work a bit here. --Swaaye 19:15, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and I saw Cyrix III content on the C3 page as off topic, so I removed it. The Winchip design team stayed in Texas, was unchanged, and from the technical specifications, pipeline length, crippled FPU, is clearly the same part, although I agree there is less information than I would like to confirm that. The Winchip page should follow the revisions of the chip until it was discontinued from production. I don't see why a change in the ownership of the IP means a new page is required.

Besides which, you don't simply 'invent' new CPUs out of thin air in 6-12 months flat, as you seem to imply is possible. The design and debug leads times are too long, never mind the limited cash and staffing in Texas for such work (about 84) engineers. So on a practical level, your suggestion a new chip might have been created for VIA, seems to defy the well established design cycles of the industry.

• well I did author about 85% of the Radeon articles

Well, since I wrote at least 20%, including about 80% of the text main narrative on the main ATI page, as well as coming up with the page divisions / structure, which you subsequently accepted, following up my work, that seems flat out impossible as a claim. Maybe you should have checked the page histories, before you made such a demonstratably false claim. I'd love to see examples cited of NVIDIA chips not being listed per generation. If thats so, its an oversight that needs sorting.

Stickedy is quite clearly pasting text run through google translation into the WIKIPEDIA see ' Der Samuel' for an example of his Google translation 'content.' How can you defend that? I can't see any excuse for using Google translation to post content in WIKIs written in languages you barely understand. Thats just flat out wrong, for multiple reasons.

• If you want to make a Cyrix III article, I suppose that might be worthwhile

Well, that would be a compromise. I certainly think it makes more sense that putting information about the Winchip / Cyrix III, onto the C3 page, while REMOVING the C7, which we all agree IS THE C3.

So anyway, we now have the Winchip on the C3 page, and the C3 spread across 4 pages - C3, C7, Eden, Corefusion. I just can't see that makes any technical sense. It does however, make a nice match between the press releases on the VIA website, and the WIKIPEDIA, which seems to be what editors are aiming for.

As I've said before, and I think the WIKIPEDIA guidelines support this, I think the WIKI should be based more upon technical matters, than trying to provide accurate summaries of corporate press releases and marketing materials.

Thats said, the current content is still clearly vastly better than most of the nonsense written about VIA out there, and if a new page for the Cyrix 3 is the best we can do as a compromise, then I'll go with it.

If others feel splitting discussion of the C3 chip onto 4 separate pages is nonsense, they can post to the talk pages, and try and get concensus on the point. Timharwoodx 21:18, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

So, you think we should build WinChip and C3 articles based not on what products were actually released, but instead try to build an article based on the supposed technical similarities between the WinChip and VIA's products? That just seems odd to me. I mean, you don't go to the Pentium III page and see Pentium Pro and Pentium II sections. They are recognizably separate processors, even if they are incredibly similar. Similarly, the Pontiac Grand Am and Chevy Lumina were horribly similar for a while too but they are still separate products.

Regarding the ATI articles, they are constructed from the product generation standpoint, looking at each generation as being based upon the high-end model of the time. The NVIDIA section is written around product brand name. Both are similar, but not exactly so. For example, the X300 and X600 aren't on the R420 page even though that is seemingly where they should fit in if you go by name. If the GeForce articles followed the Radeon model, GF4MX would be on the GF2 page, for example. Actually, GeForce 256, GeForce 2, and GeForce 4 MX would all be in the same article. I've only worked on the GeForce FX page (wanted to get the truth of those awful cards out there).

So, I gather that you are saying we should look at WinChip and C3 based upon how the Radeon articles are written? But, how should the designs be separated then? Perhaps it would make most sense to separate them by socket? What would we title the articles then, though? Loading up an article about WinChip with C3/Cyrix III material seems of course. Another problem with this is that the AMD and Intel processor articles don't follow this design at all. And I'm not going to condemn either way because I don't think either way of writing them up is wrong.

Would like to hear more opinions too, but I don't think many people are working on these articles.

And to give you the proper recognition, yes your earlier work was a sort of skeleton for me and was very helpful in providing both direction and some content. I added a ton of referenced architectural content, organized your card release data/info content, built some comprehensive tables, and linked them up by a fairly original template. I also turned the main Radeon page into a sort of table of contents. Did the same with with the GeForce page, actually. The Radeon R520 page was mine from scratch but it is just a mess now. It would take a full evening to sort that sucker out. And don't get me started on the dumb pre-pre-prelease nonsense on the R600 and R700 page. Yikes.

And don't think I'm defending this Stickely fellow. I don't really know enough of his work to judge him though. If he's a native German speaker though, that would explain the "Der" stuff, obviously. --Swaaye 22:13, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm a native German speaker not an English one. And that's causes this "Der" ("the" in English) - I just thought too quick. And that's just a proof that I wasn't using a translator since any automatic translator would transler "der" correctly to "the". Also the content of the german Wikipedia is quite different to that what I have inserted here. Anyway, I have already explained that on Talk:VIA C3. --Stickedy 03:59, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

So, let me comment some things.

"What I object to here, is the deletion of content I've written, which is technically accurate, and the failure to move it anywhere. I just don't think it acceptable to delete good quality content for no reason. Move it to the talk page, if you must, create another page for it, but deletion is definitely out of line." - I didn't delete anything important, I just moved it to the right places!

"Finally, let us examine some of the work of this editor Stickedy. He hacked about my VIA pages, and replaced good quality English, with work like the following:" - I really don't want to comment this further... Look at Talk:VIA C3 for that.

"So far as I can tell, much of his 'contributions' come from putting WIKIPEDIA German through google translation." - No, that's just not right. You can proof that by yourself. It's quite correct, that I'm not a native speakter, but I don't think that's important. Anyway, I can't find anything at Wikipedia which forbids the work of non-native speakers.

"Why is a man who can not write coherent grammatical English, doing lecturing someone such as myself who holds a masters? Let me put it this way, if Stickedy's English is this bad, what confidence can that give anyone else, he has his facts straight?" - Uh? You can check "my" facts on many Internet sites. Especially [www.sandpile.org] is a good one to start with...

So, now let me comment your opionon to group by cores: If that's strictly this way, why are there articles like Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2, Turion 64, Opteron etc and not just AMD K8? And why AMD K6, AMD K2-2 and AMD K6-III? Just the same cores... And why includes Sempron the Sockel A and Sockel 754/AM2 versions? They have close to nothing in common! But I guess you will find an answers which fits your strange opinion about that Centaur articles. The truth is this: Someone searches informations about VIA C3. He doesn't know anything about Nehemiah and Samuel 2 or even WinChip. How should he know that he has to look at WinChip for his VIA C3 with Samuel2 core?? Explain that to me! --Stickedy 03:59, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

I guess I think we should model these pages after the AMD and Intel articles. After all, VIA's and Centaur's products are quite a bit less known, haven't been around as long, and are just much less popular. If we try to go ahead with a set of articles based on this fairly ambiguous "core similarity" approach, it will end up being quite different than those two much larger collections. I think that could be quite confusing to people, even to those "in the know".

So, IMO, that would mean setting up WinChip, C3, C7, etc as separate articles. Which is how everything is laid out right now, basically. --Swaaye 19:41, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

I'll take it as it is. Fine. I still think C3/C7/Corefusion/Eden, are all variations on the same core, and Cyrix III/Winchip are also the same core, but it clearly confuses people so much, its not worth the hassle of constant editing. I've just created the Cyrix III page, as per discussion above, as our compromise. So we now have several pages, for I would argue, only 2 actual products! Timharwoodx 23:07, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

About the variations on the same core, I would say it is not the same, but SIMILAR. Clearly, Early winchip released by IDT has 4 pipline length, while Samuel/Samuel2/Erza have 12, and Nehalem/Esther have 16. In this regard, I would say you can't say they are all the same core. You can say they are REVISIONS on the same architecture.

BTW, what is your means of "only 2 actual products"? Which two then? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.202.238.120 (talk) 03:34, 24 May 2008 (UTC)