The R4200 is a microprocessor designed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI) that implemented the MIPS III instruction set architecture (ISA). It was also known as the VRX during development. The microprocessor was licensed to NEC, and the company fabricated and marketed it as the VR4200. The first VR4200, an 80 MHz part, was introduced in 1993. A faster 100 MHz part became available in 1994. The R4200 was at least in part intended for use in low-power Windows NT computers such as personal computers and laptops, reportedly offering "Pentium processor performance at a tenth of the price", having initially aimed to deliver twice the performance of a 66 MHz Intel 486DX2 processor. Reported SPECint benchmark results put the microprocessor's integer performance at around 85% of a P5-variant Pentium microprocessor, with floating-point performance being about half that of the Pentium. Expected to be used in Nintendo's "new machine due in 1995", the R4300i variant was used in the widely popular Nintendo 64 video game console. The R4200 ultimately did not see any use in personal computers and was repositioned as an embedded microprocessor that competed with the R4600. Description The R4200 is a scalar design with a five-stage classic RISC pipeline. A notable feature is the use of the integer datapath for performing arithmetic operations on the mantissa portion of a floating point number. A separate datapath was used for the exponent. This scheme reduced cost by reducing the number of transistors, the size of the chip, and power consumption. It also impacted floating point performance negatively, but the R4200's intended applications did not require high floating point performance. The R4200 has a 16 KB instruction cache and an 8 KB data cache. Both caches are direct-mapped. The instruction cache has a 32-byte line size, whereas the data cache has 16-byte line size. The data cache uses the write-back write protocol. The R4200 has a 32-entry translation lookaside buffer (TLB) for data, and a 4-entry TLB for instructions. A 33-bit physical address is supported. The system bus is 64 bits wide and operates at half the internal clock frequency. The R4200 contained 1.3 million transistors and had an area of 81 mm2. NEC fabricated the R4200 in a 600 nm CMOS process with three levels of interconnect. It was packaged in a 179-pin ceramic pin grid array that was compatible with the R4x00PC and R4600, or a 208-pin plastic quad flat