Of what I understand, then the old AMD MMX CPU´s were faster and even better than the intel MMX processors, but I could be wrong. My first computer I bought myself was an AMD processor and it was than the Pentium P4 processor. So perhaps I was just being lucky with my AMD 1000 megahertz processor. But since I am not omnipotent, then let us see what others have to say in this.

I think that there are instances where the original K6 was faster than the Pentium MMX at the same clock speed. In the beginning they really liked to compare the K6 to the Pentium Pro running 32-bit code.

What I can tell you about the original K6 is that it runs hot, the MMX implementation isn't as good as intel's and the FPU is weak. I'd take a Pentium 166MMX over a classic K6 200 any day (I owned both when they were new)

I think things really changed with the .25u K6 chips though, but by that time they were competing with the Pentium II.

I avoided the AMD cpus in the beginning because, at that time, I was not so sure if all my games and programs will run without problems in it.
Yes, the AMD's MMX and FPU implementation was quite weak in those days.

I had K6/266Mhz at the time and it sucked compared to P233 Mhz MMX. I still remember the benchmark of the game "MDK" - with P233 the performance bar went off screen, where with K6 266 it was somewhere above middle. Its similar with K5: K5@133 was always comparable with P90.

As the matter affect, the only generation where AMD was near to Intel (and even better) was the K7 generation: Athlons and durons. Every other generation was lagging behind. The only question was "how much".

When it comes to compatibility - every game will run on both of them. I never found a game that worked on intel and didnt on AMD.

elfuego wrote:

I had K6/266Mhz at the time and it sucked compared to P233 Mhz MMX. I still remember the benchmark of the game "MDK" - with P233 the performance bar went off screen, where with K6 266 it was somewhere above middle. Its similar with K5: K5@133 was always comparable with P90.

As the matter affect, the only generation where AMD was near to Intel (and even better) was the K7 generation: Athlons and durons. Every other generation was lagging behind. The only question was "how much".

When it comes to compatibility - every game will run on both of them. I never found a game that worked on intel and didnt on AMD.

I guess, I didn't miss or hit anything while only using intel processors all along. At least, the AMD does not have any incompatibilities.

The K6 loses in comparison to Pentium CPUs because of its weak, non-pipelined FPU (and to a certain extent, slower MMX performance). On the other hand, integer performance was way ahead: Thanks to very short pipelines, good branch prediction and a big TLB it even outperforms a K7 at the same clock rate.
So, the K6 is obviously not a good choice for 3D games. However, for the purposes of retro gaming, it has a killer feature: open multipliers.

elfuego wrote:

As the matter affect, the only generation where AMD was near to Intel (and even better) was the K7 generation: Athlons and durons. Every other generation was lagging behind. The only question was "how much".

In 1992/1993, people who didn't have money to burn were faced with two choices: Intel 486SX-25 or AMD 386DX-40. Guess which one was cheaper and faster for games... 😉

I faintly remember some very dumb program checking for the CPUID and refusing to run on a non-Intel CPU... 🙄

It's too bad that AMD took so damn long to get the K6 III, K6 2+ and K6 3+ out the door. If they had come out a few years earlier they would have been great chips for legacy upgrades.

The biggest bummer about later K6 systems (K6-2/III) is the mobo quality.

I have never run into a Super7 mobo with a quality AGP slot. The chipsets and the mobo makers just didn't get the AGP spec right. The AMD platforms had AGP issues until into the Athlon era.

PCI is questionable on some boards too. This will show up most obviously as sound card issues, but IDE/SCSI cards can show it too with terrible throughput. Hence the reason for the existence of George Breese's VIA PCI Latency patch.

That's no surprise, since AGP was just designed by Intel to keep competitors at bay. 😉
Sometimes I wonder what it might have been like if they hadn't released this crap port and moved to faster PCI specs instead.

Faster PCI is pretty much what AGP was AFAIK. 66MHz 32-bit PCI with some extras to let them do multiplication of data rate (and more). Rigging up an entire mobo with PCI-X or some such would've undoubtedly been more expensive than one AGP and then regular PCI slots. So AGP was probably the best way to deliver more bandwidth to video cards for cheap.

Don't forget that the usual Super 7 suspects couldn't get regular PCI right either. Even NVIDIA's nForce hardware has messed it up a few times.

PCIe sure has been trouble free though. Well, at least for video cards. I have had some major problems with 2 ATI Theater PCIe cards.....