When Intel made the Pentium II, not only did they change the core from the previous Pentium, they also changed the Bus Protocol, and the motherboard interface. This left users of Pentium I, and Pentium MMX based systems out in the cold when it came to upgrades from Intel. Like a Texas Marshall riding through a hellish August storm, came a company by the name of AMD with it’s K6-2 line of processors. It was made on the .25m process, so it was small. It came with specialized 3D instructions called 3D-Now in order to improve on the K6’s dramatically horrible FPU, which drove many hardcore 3D Gamers away. In 1999, we saw the introduction of the AMD Athlon, which took a large bit of OEM as well as Retail CPU sales away from Intel because it was finally a cheap processor that preformed just as well, if not better than, the Intel processor of the time, the Pentium !!!. The Athlon, unfortunately, was a power hog, and required a specially certified power supply in order to run it. Because of it’s power guzzling tendencies, it also required a large heatsink to dissipate that large amount of heat.

To move away from the desktop market for just a second, I’d like to talk about Mobile Processors. First of all, a mobile processor can’t be a power hog, because that would lead to a short battery life, constant battery recharges, and horrible sales on the market for any system that uses it. A processor that wants to be mobile also can’t be a hot processor, because there isn’t much room for mammoth heatsinks inside a small laptop case. Too bad for AMD, those requirements left the Athlon line out of the Mobile market. Because of that, AMD decided to continue to use the K6 line of processor for mobile usage. In mid 1999, we saw AMD revamping it’s K6 line in order to make it custom to the mobile market. It included Power NOW! Technology which stepped the voltage and speed of the processor around based on its usage. It also started to use the .18m process to manufacture the chips. This means that the chip can run faster at cooler temperatures with less of a power draw than it’s .25m counter parts. This new line of processors, was called the K6-X+ line, as opposed to the K6-X line that preceeded it.

The K6-X+ line is made in either the standard Socket 7 interface, or in a embedded BGA version, similar to how most North Bridge Chips are made today. Aside from the packing, the K6-X+ line also comes in two flavors, each being identical to the other except for the L2 Cache amount. The K6-2+ comes with 128KB of Onboard L2 Cache, while the K6-III+ follows in the III tradition with 256KB of Onboard L2 cache, running at full speed.