AMD 5k86

Historia

The 5k86 is AMDs 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 Pentiums 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.