AMD K6-III

EN Texto em inglês Ainda não há artigo no teu idioma: trecho em inglês.

The K6-III (codenamed Sharptooth) was an x86 microprocessor developed by AMD and first released on 22 February 1999. Based on the K6-2 architecture, it featured a 256 KB on-die L2 cache that improved performance over its predecessor and allowed the motherboard cache to function as an L3 cache in AMD's "TriLevel Cache" design. The K6-III was the last desktop processor officially released for Socket 7, although the later mobile K6-III+ and K6-2+ processors were widely used in desktop systems with official or unofficial BIOS updates. At its release, the K6-III competed with Intel's Pentium II and, shortly afterwards, the Pentium III. Its integer performance made the 450 MHz model one of the fastest x86 processors available at launch, although its inherited floating-point unit generally lagged behind Intel's processors in 3D games that were optimized for Intel architectures. Production of the K6-III ended after the introduction of AMD's Athlon, which superseded it in AMD's product line. Revised low-power K6-III+ and K6-2+ models, incorporating PowerNow! and Enhanced 3DNow! and manufactured on a 180 nm process, were designed for mobile computers but later became popular among desktop enthusiasts and overclockers. In conception, the design is simple: it was a K6-2 with on-die 256KiB L2 cache. In execution, however, the design was not simple, with 21.4 million transistors. The pipeline was short compared to that of the Pentium III and thus the design did not scale well past 500 MHz.