K5-75 to K5-166: March 1996 to January 1997

AMD introduced the K5 to compete with Intel's classic Pentium. This CPU was shipped with speeds of between 75 MHz and 166 MHz. It was manufactured with 0.35-micron process technology, the processor had 32 KB L1 cache, and the L2 cache was integrated on the motherboard. Maximum thermal dissipation was between 11.6 W and 16 W. AMD had to resort to the use of Intel chipsets (430VX, 430HX, 430TX) for its Socket 5 platform, as no other alternatives were available.

K6-166 to K6-300: April 1997 to April 1998

Compared with its predecessor, the AMD K5, this Intel Pentium competitor boasted an increase in clock speed from 66 MHz to 100 MHz. The 0.35-micron process was retained, and the number of transistors increased from 4.3 million on the K-5 to 8.8 million on the K-6. The CPUs were designed exclusively for use on Socket 7 boards.

K6-2/233 to K6-2/550: May 1998 to February 2000

The successor to the classic AMD K-6 was the K6-2, fitted with 3DNow! instruction set extensions. These provided extra performance with a number of 3D games in combination with specially written drivers. Compared with that of the K-6, the L1 cache was doubled to 64 KB, although the slower L2 cache remained on the motherboard. The number of transistors was now 9.3 million, and AMD moved to 0.25-micron process technology.

Our system with the AMD K6-2/500.

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