AMD K6-2 - History

History

The K6-2 was designed as a competitor to Intel's flagship processor, the significantly more expensive Pentium II. Performance of the two chips was similar: the previous K6-2 tended to be faster for general-purpose computing, while the Intel part was faster in x87 floating-point applications. To battle the Pentium 2's dominance on floating point calculations the K6-2 was the first CPU to introduce a floating point SIMD instruction set (dubbed 3DNow! by AMD), which significantly boosted performance. However programs needed to be specifically tailored for the new instructions and despite beating Intel's SSE instruction set to market, 3DNow achieved only limited popularity.

Super Socket 7, which increased the processor bus from 66 MHz to 100 MHz, allowed the K6-2 to withstand the effects of ever-increasing CPU multipliers fairly gracefully and in later life it remained surprisingly competitive. Nearly all K6-2s were designed to use 100 MHz Super Socket 7 mainboards, allowing the system-bus to keep pace with the K6-2's clock-frequency.

The K6-2 was a very financially successful chip and enabled AMD to earn the revenue it would need to introduce the forthcoming Athlon. The introductory K6-2 300 was by far the best-selling variant. It rapidly established an excellent reputation in the marketplace and offered a favorable price/performance ratio versus Intel's Celeron 300A. While the K6-2 had mediocre floating-point performance compared to the Celeron, it offered faster system RAM access (courtesy of the Super 7 mainboard), as well as 3DNow graphics extensions.

As the market moved on, AMD released a long series of faster K6-2 parts, the best-selling ones being the 350, 400, 450, and 500. By the time the 450 and the 500 were mainstream parts, the K6-2 family had already moved to the budget PC segment, where it still competed successfully against Intel's Celeron.