AMD K6
Marketing Logo
Developer	NexGen, AMD
Manufacturer	AMD
Type	Microprocessors
Introduction	April 2, 1997 (launch)
Production	1997
Architecture	Pentium II-compatible superscalar microprocessors with MMX
ISA	IA-32
µarch	K6
Word size	32 bit 4 octets 8 nibbles
Process	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm , 250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm
Technology	CMOS
Clock	166 MHz-300 MHz
Package	CPGA-321
Socket	Socket 7
Succession
←	→
K5	K6-2

K6 was a family of 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed by AMD and introduced in early 1997 as a successor to their K5 line. Contrary to its namesake, K6 design is entirely NexGen's and not based on K5 (See § Overview). K6 lower cost along with superior performance (comparable or better than Pentium II's clock-for-clock) made these processors a viable alternative to Intel's. K6 gained wide acceptance in the PC market.

Overview

AMD-K6/300AFR

In October of 1995, when AMD was suffering a number of setbacks in their K5 design (so much so that AMD's profitability depended on Am5x86), a small fabless company by the name of NexGen was making headway by announcing their 6th generation x86, Nx686, at the 8th Annual Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California. The Nx686 was a very advanced microprocessor based on their previous RISC86 microarchitecture which was a RISC core that translated CISC instructions into smaller µops. The chip managed to comfortably take on Pentium, being a superscalar with speculative out-of-order execution and supporting MMX.

Following AMD's late arrival of K5 and additional delays after release due to subpar performance with the first design (SSA/5), AMD was already well into designing their next generation of chips. AMD couldn't afford the same sort of problems with K6 as they did with K5. In 1995 AMD was in bad shape as far as the K5 and K6 designs go; at the same time NexGen had a great product and engineering team but no real outlet to manufacture and sell it (at least not one that could compete with Intel's). On October 21, 1995 AMD announced that they will be buying NexGen for about $857 million in stock.

Following the acquisition of NexGen, AMD simply scrapped their own K6 design and renamed Nx686 K6 instead. The design underwent a number of small modifications: the chip was modified to be bus and pin-compatible with Intel's Pentium, making it a drop-in replacement/alternative to any Intel's Socket 7 motherboard.

Launched in April 1997, the final result was AMD's K6 - an entirely NexGen's designed microarchitecture, bus-compatible, pin-compatible, and software-compatible with Intel's Pentium including superior FPU and MMX support. Selling well under Pentium prices allowed K6 processors to gain widespread acceptance.

Early K6 processors were given PR2 ratings (Pentium II-based performance rating), however the rating system was dropped just a few months later because the chips were performing as well or better than Pentium II processors at the same frequency.

Architecture

Main article: K6 Microarchitecture

CPGA-321

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Developers

• Greg Favor, Chief Architect, NexGen

Die Shot

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Members

Originally released for Desktops only, after a process shrink AMD released a number of mobile processors as well.

Desktop Models

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Desktop K6 Processors
Model	Launched	Process	Freq	Mult.	Bus	Max Mem	VCORE	Package	Min Tcase	Max Tcase
AMD-K6-166ALR	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	166.66 MHz 0.167 GHz 166,660 kHz	2.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6-166ALYD	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	166.66 MHz 0.167 GHz 166,660 kHz	2.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6-200AFR	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	199.99 MHz 0.2 GHz 199,990 kHz	3	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6-200ALR	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	199.99 MHz 0.2 GHz 199,990 kHz	3	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6-200ALYD	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	199.99 MHz 0.2 GHz 199,990 kHz	3	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6-233AFR	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	233.33 MHz 0.233 GHz 233,330 kHz	3.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6-233ANR	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	233.33 MHz 0.233 GHz 233,330 kHz	3.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6-233APR	May 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	233.33 MHz 0.233 GHz 233,330 kHz	3.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6/266AFR	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	266.66 MHz 0.267 GHz 266,660 kHz	4	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.2 V 22 dV 220 cV 2,200 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6/300AFR	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	299.99 MHz 0.3 GHz 299,990 kHz	4.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.2 V 22 dV 220 cV 2,200 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6/PR2-166ALR	2 April 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	166.66 MHz 0.167 GHz 166,660 kHz	2.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
AMD-K6/PR2-200ALR	2 April 1997	350 nm 0.35 μm 3.5e-4 mm	199.99 MHz 0.2 GHz 199,990 kHz	3	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.9 V 29 dV 290 cV 2,900 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	70 °C 343.15 K 158 °F 617.67 °R
Count: 12

Mobile Models

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Mobile K6 Processors
Model	Launched	Process	Freq	Mult.	Bus	Max Mem	VCORE	Package	Min Tcase	Max Tcase
AMD-K6/233ACZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	233.33 MHz 0.233 GHz 233,330 kHz	3.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2 V 20 dV 200 cV 2,000 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
AMD-K6/233ADZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	233.33 MHz 0.233 GHz 233,330 kHz	3.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.1 V 21 dV 210 cV 2,100 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
AMD-K6/233BCZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	233.33 MHz 0.233 GHz 233,330 kHz	3.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2 V 20 dV 200 cV 2,000 mV	CBGA-360	0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
AMD-K6/266ACZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	266.66 MHz 0.267 GHz 266,660 kHz	4	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.1 V 21 dV 210 cV 2,100 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
AMD-K6/266ADZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	266.66 MHz 0.267 GHz 266,660 kHz	4	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.1 V 21 dV 210 cV 2,100 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
AMD-K6/266BCZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	266.66 MHz 0.267 GHz 266,660 kHz	4	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2 V 20 dV 200 cV 2,000 mV	CBGA-360	0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
AMD-K6/300ADZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	299.99 MHz 0.3 GHz 299,990 kHz	4.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.1 V 21 dV 210 cV 2,100 mV		0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
AMD-K6/300BDZ	5 March 1998	250 nm 0.25 μm 2.5e-4 mm	299.99 MHz 0.3 GHz 299,990 kHz	4.5	66.66 MHz 0.0667 GHz 66,660 kHz	4,096 MiB 4,194,304 KiB 4,294,967,296 B 4 GiB 0.00391 TiB	2.1 V 21 dV 210 cV 2,100 mV	CBGA-360	0 °C 273.15 K 32 °F 491.67 °R	85 °C 358.15 K 185 °F 644.67 °R
Count: 8

Documents

DataSheet

• AMD-K6 MMX Enhanced Processor Multimedia Technology; Publication #20695 Revision E/0; June 1997
• AMD-K6 Processor Data Sheet; Publication #20695 Revision H/0; March 1998
• Mobile AMD-K6 Processor Data Sheet; Publication #21049 Revision H/0; September 1999

Software

• AMD K86 Family BIOS and Software Tools Developers Guide; Publication #21062 Revision C/0, March 1997
• AMD K86 Family BIOS and Software Tools Developers Guide; Publication #21062 Revision E/O, June 1997
• Embedded AMD-K6 Processors BIOS Design Guide; Publication #23913 Revision A/0; November 2000
• AMD-K6 MMX Processor Multimedia Extensions; Publication #20726 Revision B/0, March 1997
• AMD-K6 MMX Enhanced Processor Multimedia Technology; Publication #20726 Revision D/0; January 2000
• AMD-K6 MMX Processor I/O Model; Publication #21084 Revision A/0, March 1997

Other

• AMD-K6 Processor Revision Guide - Model 7; Publication #21846 Revision H/0; June 1999
• K6 AMD PROCESSOR RECOGNITION Application Note; Publication #20734 Revision D/0, January 1997

See also

• Pentium II
• K5