The CPU market longed for a good performing Intel alternative, the K6 met that demand. When the K6 was lauched in April 1997 there was a big demand for the CPU and AMD struggeled to meet it. Early K6's were manufactured at 0.35µ but this manufacturing process gave AMD endless troubles resulting in low yields.

Intel launched the 286 with a speed of 6 MHz, the speed was gradually increased to 8MHz, 10MHz, 12MHZ, 16MHZ, 20MHz and eventually 25MHz. Intel sold licenses to third party manufacturers like AMD, Siemens and HARRIS. They were allowed to clone the design and produce their own 286's.

The processor that really started the Personal Computer business was the 8080! Four people designed the chip in about 1 year. Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor were responsible for the instruction set, and Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima were responsible for the circuit layout. The processor had 78 instructions and the 8080A ran at 2 MHz.

March 26, 2006
At last i found a scanner which can scan my collection of K6-2 CPU's with engraved printings. (HP ScanJet 2400) The ones I had were all added to the site! In total 66 new CPU's/FPU's have been added to the collection making the new grand total of 902. Just 98 more to reach the magic 1000!

The site got a little update too, a new logo! I hope you all like it, any comments? please mail me. Compliments only please ;-)

I have also been busy writing new articles. Not so long ago I updated the article I had on the NexGen Nx586, but I got some new information which will be incorporated soon. Also, I wrote the first of a three part story on the AMD Athlon. Go ahead and read it, if you have any comments feel free to mail me.

Here are some of the more special chips from this update: