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The AMD 5k86 Processor
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The 5k86 is AMD's 5th generation x86 implementation, introduced in March 1996. The processor, later renamed to K5, was eagerly awaited and it was hoped that it would provide a viable alternative to the Pentium early in the Pentium's life cycle. Unfortunately, AMD delivered the processor over a year late and at much lower clock speeds than had been originally anticipated. As a result instead of being the "Pentium killer" AMD had hoped for, the K5 was positioned as a low-cost Pentium alternative.
The K5 is, internally, a very advanced processor, the most advanced of the fifth-generation chips. Internally it is more comparable to the Pentium Pro. It is an x86 translation/emulation processor, decoding x86 instructions into RISC-like microinstructions and executing them on a 6-pipeline internal core. This allows the K5 to achieve higher performance than a Pentium of the same speed. |
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