Weitek
| Private | |
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Fate | 1996 acquired by Rockwell's Semiconductor Systems |
| Founded | 1981 |
| Defunct | 1996 |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California |
| Products | microprocessors, chipset |
Weitek Corporation was a 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. During the early 1990s most CPU designs started including FPUs built into the system, basically “for free”, and Weitek made a series of attempts to break into the general CPU and graphics driver market. By 1995 the company was almost dead, and in late 1996 the remains were purchased by Rockwell's Semiconductor Systems and quickly disappeared.
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 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. Later upgrades to this design led to the 2167, 3167 and 4167. Weitek would later deliver similar FPUs for the MIPS architecture, known as the XL line. Weitek FPUs had several differences compared to x87 offerings, lacking extended double precision but having a register-file rather than a stack-based model.
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supercomputer applications, Weitek found themselves seriously disadvantaged by their fab, which was becoming rather “outdated”.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.
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