AMD’s K6-III ‘Sharptooth’ debuted this week in 1999 with on-die L2 cache to savage the Intel Pentium II — it also held the line against the Pentium II

“AMD launched its first processors with on-die L2 cache this week in 1999, heralding the beginning of the Super Socket 7 era. With its new K6-III CPUs, AMD presented a major architectural leap above the popular K6-2 line, and knocked the Intel Pentium II 450 off its fastest processor perch. Intel would quickly follow up with its first Pentium III Katmai CPUs, but the K6-III could still outclass its pricier foe in cache latency-sensitive apps.

The Sharptooth scene​

Intel abandoned Socket 7 in 1997, with the Pentium II series moving to the rather unusual Slot 1 motherboard interface. However, AMD persevered with Socket 7, pleasing PC builders and upgraders for several more years. The K6-III was an important move for AMD in keeping Socket 7 alive.


The new AMD K6-III with on-die cache launched in 400 and 450 MHz SKUs on Feb 22, 1999. AMD positioned it as a pre-prepared answer to Intel’s upcoming Pentium III (Feb 26 launch). Reviews and comparisons from the time show that AMD’s gambit largely paid off – maintaining the red team’s price-performance competitive edge until the K7 Athlon series tech could trickle down to the mainstream.”

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...it-also-held-the-line-against-the-pentium-iii

I went to school to learn about computers, I knew ZERO
I learned how it works, and hardware in that class
I built a computer with a 266 Intel..it was amazing, I had no idea.
I graduated class with that 266, and Immediately found a local shop with a 450 for the upgrade...I was so happy, but people around me thought I was crazy..."Who is AMD, WHAT are you doing"
I've been AMD Since, Slot A was a disaster for me, I spent 500 on chip/ Asus K7M board, and it was ridiculously unstable...I was grounding everything, and it didn't help.
I was happy with Socket A...
I ignored Dozer years entirely for hardware, but I read about that disaster.

I bought one of these when they came out it was fine. It ended its days slotted into a AST laptop. that had a 200Mhz Intel in it. It ran underclocked at 300Mhz or something (as high at the laptop dipswitches went) but with much larger cache.

I took a computer repair class back in high school and most of the better e-waste that we practiced on were these or the k-2's

erek said:

With its new K6-III CPUs, AMD presented a major architectural leap above the popular K6-2 line, and knocked the Intel Pentium II 450 off its fastest processor perch.

Click to expand...

This is true only if we talk INT/ALU performance. With especially mobo with decently sized L2 cache which then became L3 cache you could expect some decent performance.

The small issue was that at this time what was the real bottleneck was not INT/ALU performance but FPU.
Pentium 2 was still faster in FPU and therefore also in games. 3D Now! extensions which AMD had could help and to a degree did help (mostly used in GPU drivers) but rarely any game used them and even if then performance improvement wasn't that big. Or at least judging from games which got patches.

Other issue for these K6 CPUs was that the config to have was Celeron 300A or other with L2 cache and OCing the heck out of it - which in this case in games gave even better performance than P2.
Yet another issue is that there were no really great chipsets for Super Socket 7. Intel had 440LX and latter 440BX chipsets while AMD was stuck using some VIA, SiS and such chipsets which didn't give them any favors. More problematic, less stable (especially in - and what really mattered at the time Windows 9x). If you compared VIA vs VIA then in this case I would say AMD platform was even better with VIA putting more effort in to AMD platform but if you compared perfectly stable 440LX vs some VIA chipset... yeah, you really wanted Intel here if you didn't want your Windows 98 rig to be even more unstable than it otherwise already was.

Anyways, other than games the common use case for PCs was watching DivX movies. AMD K6-III were fast enough for these. With previous models clock vs clock Intel easily won but with something like 450MHz K6-III you were pretty much covered. Or at least for the typical barely better than VHS quality DivX movies which often weighted 700MB as to fit on single CD-R disc.

In some specific use cases K6-III could be faster than Pentium II. System overall felt snappier, programs opened a bit faster etc. Again, that didn't made these CPUs knock P2 out of pedestal because the real bottleneck was usually FPU and here Intel dominated... or at least until AMD K7 but that is entirely different story.