In a development that makes NexGen Inc’s Nx686 a much more serious threat to Intel Corp under Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s tutelage than had been assumed, NexGen has revealed a secret project to make the Nx686 – or Am686 as it will presumably be known, pin-compatible with the Pentium, so that it can be used with present Pentium (rather than future P6) board designs, and to work with all the chip sets Intel has designed for the Pentium. The in-house NexGen benchmarks suggest that a prototype of the 180MHz Nx686 outperformed the Pentium Pro on both 16-bit and 32-bit software. The NexGen processor is also expected to offer a multimedia co-processor that will execute MPEG algorithms and other numerical tasks.Vinod Dham, who jumped ship from Intel to join Nexgen is staying aboard: At Nexgen, it was like guerrilla warfare but you have to fight some battles. At AMD, I get to be a full general again, and I will have an army, too, he says.