Weitek

Weitek Corporation was an American chip-design company that originally focused on floating-point units for a number of commercial CPU designs. During the early to mid-1980s, Weitek designs could be found powering a number of high-end designs and parallel-processing supercomputers. Weitek started in 1981, when several Intel engineers left to form their own company. Weitek developed math coprocessors for several systems, including those based on the Motorola 68000 family, the 1064 and 1164, and for Intel-based i286 systems, the 1067. Intel's own FPU design for the i386 fell far behind in development, and Weitek delivered the 1167 for them. The Weitek 1167 Floating Point Coprocessor provided the combination of Weitek 1163, 1164 and 1165 chipset. Later upgrades to this design led to the 2167, 3167 and 4167. Weitek would later outfit FPUs to the early SPARC architecture such as the 3170 and 3172. Weitek FPUs had several differences compared to x87 offerings, lacking extended double precision but having a register-file rather than a stack-based model, or using memory-mapped IO as opposed to port-mapped IO. As orders increased for supercomputer applications, Weitek found themselves seriously disadvantaged by their fab, which was becoming rather outdated. HP approached them with a deal to use their newer fabs. This proved advantageous for both, and soon HP's fabs were open to anyone. Weitek also worked with HP on the design of their latest PA-RISC design and sold their own version known as the RISC 8200, which was sold as an embedded design and had some use in laser printers. In the late 1980s Weitek saw a new opportunity and started developing frame buffers for Sun Microsystems workstations. In the early 1990s they also introduced the SPARC POWER μP (as in "power-up"), a pin-compatible version of the SPARC processor. The μP could be dropped into existing SPARCstation 2 and SPARCstation IPX workstations and ran at 80 MHz, double the clock speed of the CPUs it replaced.