Five years ago: AMD P-133 here, P-166 soon

The K5-PR133 runs at a slower clock speed but runs applications at the same speed as the Intel CPU according to the ubiquitous 'P' rating system, filling in an glaring gap in the chip maker's product line. AMD said the CPU will cost slightly less than the Intel equivalent.

The Texan company said it also expects to deliver a PR-166 (166MHz Pentium equivalent) before the end of 1996, meaning that it will have gone from PR-75 to something approaching Intel's fastest Pentium in about nine months. "AMD has taken a lot of criticism for delivering late and I'd be the first to agree with that ... but the engineering execution is excellent now," said Richard Baker, European marketing manager for PC products.

Baker said the arrival of the faster devices would help gain design wins from PC vendors demanding a range of chips from a supplier. "There aren't going to be many makers that will launch systems based on one processor," he said.

AMD expects to have its K6 MMX chips in production in the first half of 1997. The parts will slot in to Socket 7 on motherboards and ship with separate 32Kb instruction cache and 32Kb data caches. Baker said the chip will "meet or exceed [Intel's MMX Pentium Pro] Klamath performance".

Separately, ground is currently being broken on a new chip fabrication plant in Dresden, Germany. The $1.8 billion factory is expected to be in production by the end of 1998.