Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker Integrated Device Technology Inc has announced a surprise deriviative of its Orion implementation of the MIPS Technologies Inc R4000 RISC, the R4700, designed for the emerging Windows NT and Unix-based three dimensional graphics market. It is the first Orion that takes a 3.3V power supply. It will be available at 100MHz, 133MHz, 150MHz and 175MHz, topping out at 80 MFLOPS. The company estimates that the chip will deliver a SPECint of 132 and a SPECfp of 95 at 175MHz. Samples are due in the first quarter of next year, with 10,000-up prices starting at $220. It includes an on-chip two-way associative cache of 16Kb and is claimed to achieve more than 500M-bytes-per-second bus bandwidth. It is fully compatible with the R4600 and supports the Orion FlexBus features, a software initialisation mechanism that enables a system designer to tailor the microprocessor’s internal frequency to the system bus.
