Revision as of 12:41, 7 September 2016

AMD K6-III
K6-III marking logo
Developer	AMD
Manufacturer	AMD
Type	Microprocessors
Introduction	October 16, 1998 (announced) February 22, 1999 (launch)
Architecture	IA-32 with MMX and 3DNow+
ISA	IA-32
µarch	K6-III
Word size	32 32 bit 4 octets 8 nibbles
Process	180 nm 0.18 μm 1.8e-4 mm , 250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm
Technology	CMOS
Clock	333 MHz-450 MHz
Package	CPGA-321
Socket	Socket 7, Super Socket 7
Succession
←	→
K6-2	Athlon Duron

K6-III was a family of 32-bit x86 microprocessors introduced by AMD in February of 1999 as a successor to the K6-2 family. K6-III was an attempt by AMD to stretch the life of the original K6 (a NexGen design) for a bit longer while they worked on K7 (Athlon).

Overview

AMD's K7 was well into development in 1998 when they announced a partnership with Motorola (now Freescale) with the goal of improving their manufacturing problems in an attempt to take on Intel. Athlon was to be released in mid-1999. The K6-III served as a temporary solution, introducing a number of small modification to the microarchitecture which resulted in a performance increase. The significant increase in performance is a result of a new large on-die L2$. Previously, systems incorporated an L2$ on the motherboard which ranged from 512 KB to 2MB. This changed with K6-III which added 256 KB of level 2 cache on-die. AMD branded this setup "TriLevel Cache", moving the on-motherboard cache to level 3.

As with K6-2, K6-III offers 3DNow!, MMX, and 3DNow+ which contained a number of new DSP instructions. K6-III, however, did not incorporated any new Intel MMX instructions. Like its predecessors, K6-III further extended the life of the Super 7 socket.

K6-III lived for only a few months. By June of 1999, AMD moved on to Athlon by which point K6-III lost any competitive advantage. In late 1999, Intel suffered major manufacturing issues, creating massive shortages of Pentium III processors. This created significant demand for Athlon models forcing AMD to discontinue K6-III to allocate more resources to Athlon to cope with the demand.

Architecture

Main article: K6-III Microarchitecture

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Die Shot

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Identification

Members

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