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The K6 MMX processors developed by Advanced Micro Devices deliver the highest throughput to date for a commercially available x86-family CPU-they operate at clock speeds as high as 233 MHz. By year's end, the company plans to release a version that clocks at 266 MHz. Such clock speeds will give the K6-series CPUs the best performance when running both Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems.
Furthermore, the processors include the 57 extra instructions defined by Intel for the MMX enhancements to the Pentium instruction set. As a result, the AMD-K6 MMX CPUs are totally software-compatible with the Intel Pentium that includes MMX instructions, as well as with Intel's Pentium Pro CPUs. However, thanks to the RISC86 microarchitecture developed by AMD's designers and the NexGen design team acquired by the company, the K6 processors execute the instructions more efficiently than the Pentium or Pentium Pro. Consequently, the K6 processors can offer higher throughputs at equivalent clock speeds.
According to the popular Winstone97 benchmarks, systems with the K6 delivered superior performance to comparably configured systems using...