What is the difference between the AMD K6 2 and the AMD K6 3?
The AMD K6 3 design includes an “on-board” 256 KB Level 2 cache that is not present on K6 2 chips. This cache supplements the on-board 64 KB Level 1 cache. The former L2 cache on the M571, running at front side bus speed, becomes a Level 3 cache when a K6 3 chip is used. The K6 3’s on-board Level 2 cache provides increased performance over the K6 2. Expect a performance difference between K6 2 and K6 3 chips running at the same speed of approximately 20%, or expect that a K6 3 400MHz chip will perform roughly similar to a K6 2 500 MHz chip. These comparisons will vary depending upon the particular applications that are being run on a given system. One other advantage offered by the K6 3 chip is the ability to effectively use more system memory, or RAM. The M571 L2 cache is 512 KB in size, and can cache only 128 MB of system memory. Using more memory than this can result in LESS performance, because Windows will be using memory in the uncached area. A K6 3 processor’s on-chip 256 KB L2
