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

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). 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. By June of 1999, AMD moved on to Athlon.

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.