Revision as of 07:41, 17 May 2016

Am5_x86 was a family of highest performance 486-based microprocessors introduced by AMD in 1995. These processors came with all the features of the Enhanced Am486s but had the highest clock speed available. These chips, which ended up performing better than the Pentium-75, became the de-facto upgrade for users with existing 486-based systems. This family solidified AMD position as the official Intel competition.

History

In 1995 AMD was busy working on their first home-grown x86-compatible microarchitecture, K5. Has a sort of a stopgap between the Am486 and the yet-to-be-released K5-based processors, AMD released the Am5x86 family. The name came about due to competitors selling 5th generation-based x86 processors (e.g. Cyrix 5x86) - people were more likely to buy a system with "5" vs "4". AMD took this opportunity to utilize their latest technology and release a final, highest clocked 486 chip for much lower price than their competitor's latest chips. This is very similar to what they had done with their highly successful 40 MHz version of their Am386 family. Later, strong sales of Am5x86 played a crucial role in keeping AMD's profitability while their K5 microarchitecture was experiencing sever delays. AMD continued to sell Am5x86 chips for personal computers until 1999 and for embedded systems well into the 2000s.