Lesson plan
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 WTL 1064 and 1164, and for Intel-based i286 systems, the WTL 1067 . The 1067 was physically implemented as three chips, the WTL 1163, 1164 and 1165. When Intel's own FPU design for the i386 fell far behind in development, Weitek delivered the 1167 for it in the form of a daughtercard. Improvements in chip manufacturing allowed this to be reduced to a single-chip version, the WTL 2167 . The WTL 3167 of 1988, also known as the Abacus, extended the system for use in Intel 80386 systems, and finally the WTL 4167 in 1989 for the Intel 80486 which used the 486's larger socket format and ran at higher clock rates than the 3167 to provide higher performance of around 4 MFLOPS for single precision. Weitek would later outfit FPUs to the early SPARC architecture such as the 3170 and 3172.…
Article summary
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 WTL 1064 and 1164, and for Intel-based i286 systems, the WTL 1067 . The 1067 was physically implemented as three chips, the WTL 1163, 1164 and 1165. When Intel's own FPU design for the i386 fell far behind in development, Weitek delivered the 1167 for it in the form of a daughtercard. Improvements in chip manufacturing allowed this to be reduced to a single-chip version, the WTL 2167 . The WTL 3167 of 1988, also known as the Abacus, extended the system for use in Intel 80386 systems, and finally the WTL 4167 in 1989 for the Intel 80486 which used the 486's larger socket format and ran at higher clock rates than the 3167 to provide higher performance of around 4 MFLOPS for single precision. Weitek would later outfit FPUs to the early SPARC architecture such as the 3170 and 3172.…
Key claims
No claims recorded.
Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
No sources recorded.
Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.