Comment by rob74
7 hours ago
Wow, I wasn't aware of that either! I didn't have an AMD K5 PC, but (IIRC) a K6-III - did that still have the same underlying architecture?
7 hours ago
Wow, I wasn't aware of that either! I didn't have an AMD K5 PC, but (IIRC) a K6-III - did that still have the same underlying architecture?
No. AMD K5 did not have successors.
AMD bought the company NexGen and K6, K6-2 and K6-III were based on the NexGen design. I had been the happy owner of a K6-2, which did not have the integrated L2 cache of K6-III, but I had a friend who had bought earlier an AMD K5.
The K6 family also did not have successors, as Athlon had a very different microarchitecture, with a lot of inspiration from DEC Alpha.
The AMD K6 family of CPUs has the distinction of being one of the very few modern CPUs that are described in an entire book: "The anatomy of a high-performance microprocessor : a systems perspective" by Bruce Shriver.
I am not aware about any comparable description for any more recent CPU, because nowadays the companies have become much more secretive.
It is likely that the publication of many details about K6 was also approved because it was an architecture abandoned by AMD, as they focused on Athlon for their future (this was not yet known publicly when the book was launched, in 1998).