The R4200 was at least in part intended for use in low-power Windows NT computers such as personal computers and laptops,[1]: 468 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.
A notable feature is the use of the integer datapath for performing arithmetic operations on the mantissa portion of a floating point number.
The system bus is 64 bits wide and operates at half the internal clock frequency.
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 pack (PQFP).
[3] It differs from the R4200 by featuring an improved integer multiplier with a lower latency and a cut-down 32-bit system bus for reduced cost.
A derivative of the VR4300 was developed by NEC for the Nintendo 64 game console, clocked at 93.75 MHz and labeled NUS-CPU.
Although development boards for the Nintendo 64 used stock NEC VR4300 CPUs, the final CPU has been found to be not pin-compatible.
[citation needed] NEC produced two other derivatives of the R4300 for the general embedded market, the VR4305 and VR4310, announced on 20 January 1998.