Today (Thursday) sees the launch of Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s K6-2 processor, as anticipated earlier this month (CI No 3,402). The K6-2 is the first chip from AMD to include its new 3Dnow! 3D graphics instruction set, with which AMD is hoping to pre-empt Intel Corp’s Katmai or MMX-2 instructions, due out during the first half of next year. The K6-2 will be pitched against Intel’s Pentium II, and runs with clock speeds of 266MHz and 300MHz initially. At the announcement, to be made by AMD executive vice president and chief technical officer Atiq Raza at the E3 Expo show in Atlanta, Georgia, AMD is expected to also reveal plans for the AMD-K6-3 product, an enhanced version of the K6-2 with 256k on-chip level 2 cache, due out in the second half of this year. The K6-3 is expected to have 21.3m transistors (compared with the K6-2’s 9.3m) on a 135 sq. mm die, with clock speeds expected to reach 400MHz. It will have optional support for external level 3 cache. After that comes the K7 processor, planned for 1999, which will feature new single edge connector packaging and use the Alpha 21264 bus, which AMD has licensed from Digital Equipment Corp. The E3 event is the largest annual industry event for the video games companies AMD hopes the chip will attract.
