• 1993

Hardware Description

The M6100 PICA is a system logic chipset designed by Acer Laboratories introduced in 1993. PICA stands for Performance-enhanced Input-output and CPU Architecture. It was based on the Jazz architecture developed by Microsoft and supported the MIPS Technologies R4000 or R4400 microprocessors. The chipset was designed for computers that run Windows NT, and therefore used ARC firmware to boot Windows NT. The chipset consisted of six chips: a CPU and secondary cache controller, a buffer, a I/O cache and bus controller, a memory controller, and two data buffers.