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AMD's fast new chip, the K6: AMD K6 becomes the first on the mar

© Michael Christopher Brinton

I know I promised to finish my articles about buying on the internet, but the AMD K6 release is big news for the computer industry, and I wanted to give you the scoop. On April 2, was the well anticipated release of the AMD K6. The K6 is a next generation processor to compete with Intel's Pentium Pro and MMX chips. Traditionally, AMD has produced chips that are very close to Intel's chips, but they were released after Intel, and had some fallbacks. With the release of the K6, AMD beat Intel to making a faster chip. (Within the next month or two Intel plans to release a new chip, the Pentium II.)

In the past, what lead people to buying AMD's chips was their low prices, but usually weaker performance accounted for the low prices. Currently the K6 benchmarks faster than a Pentium Pro. (at most operations, see the Benchmarks for more in-depth information) The K6 has been released with clock speeds of 166mhz and 200mhz.(233mhz is expected within a month.) Also, most everyone has heard about the new MMX instruction set for computer chips, and the K6 is MMX enhanced.

Here are the benchmarks for the K6

Performance PC Configuration: Winstone 97 Matrox Millenium (4MB) Graphics Adapter DPT PM2144UW Caching Controller SCSI UW Seagate Cheetah 4LP HD 1024x768x16 bits/pixel AMD-K6: FIC PA-2011 VP2 Chipset 512K L2 cache 64MB SDRAM	Pentium Pro Tyan S1661 Intel 440FX chipset 256K L2 cache 64MB EDO DRAM Pentium w/MMX: Gigabyte GA-586HX Intel Triton HX chipset 512K L2 cache 64MB EDO RAM
Windows 95 Mainstream Benchmarks
Windows NT Mainstream Benchmarks
Windows 95 Performance Benchmarks
Windows NT Performance Benchmarks

One of the main features of the K6 is its price. When it was released, it sold about $280-300 for 166mhz version and $430-480 for the 200mhz version. This is far below the price of $550-700 for a Pentium Pro 200 and $550-600 for a Pentium 200 MMX. Because of the K6's release, competition has begun between Intel and AMD, and because of this, Intel plans to lowered its chip prices on at the end of the month. When Intel announced its price cuts, AMD followed up by saying that their chip prices would always be 25% lower at the OEM level. (OEM's buy in quanties of 1000 and then resell the chips, so often when price cuts happen, the OEM's and resellers will make more money and comsumers won't get the entire value of the price cut.)

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