Advanced Micro Devices Inc officially announced the first shipments of its much flagged K6 sixth-generation x86 compatible processor yesterday, claiming it to be smaller, faster, easier to use, more energy efficient and less expensive than Intel Corp’s Pentium Pro. In fact, AMD says it has already shipped thousands of units, and says it is ramping up to ship hundreds of thousands this quarter and millions more during the balance of the year. The chip, which derives from AMD’s 1995 acquisition of NexGen Inc (CI No 2,777) is MMX multimedia extension-compliant and uses the Pentium chip’s Socket 7 mounting technology, something which AMD claims gives it an advantage over its competitor, Cyrix Corp, which according to the company requires system manufacturers to use new motherboard designs that increase the cost structure. Around 80% of the personal computers sold in 1997 will employ the Socket 7 infrastructure for motherboards, chipsets and BIOS. The AMD-K6 comes in three clock speeds: 233MHz, 200MHz and 166MHz, with higher speed grades promised. It has 8.8 million transistors and is manufactured using AMD’s 0.35 micron five-layer metal silicon process technology at its Austin, Texas-based plant. It uses C4 Controlled Collapse Chip Connection interconnection technology rather than the usual wire-bonding techniques, so that all of the silicon real-estate can be used for input-output connections. The extra performance comes from the chip’s superscalar RISC core, 64Kb level one cache, multiple decoders, specialized parallel execution units and high performance floating point unit. Pricing is $469 for the AMD-K6-233, $349 for the 200, and $244 for the 166, each in 1,000 unit quantities. AMD has support from third-party suppliers of chipsets and BIOS, including Acer Inc, National Semiconductor Inc, VIA Technologies Inc, American Megatrends Inc and Phoenix Technologies Ltd. On the systems side, the supporters include Cybermax Computer Inc, Everex Systems Inc, Magitronic Technology Inc, Tatung Co of America, Techmedia Computer Systems Corp and Vobis Microcomputer AG. On Tuesday, a federal judge denied Intel Corp’s request for a temporary restraining order over AMD’s use of the term MMX. A further hearing on April 29 will determine whether or not a preliminary injunction preventing use of the term should be issued. Cyrix Corp has settled with Intel.
