Shipping of K6-III is slated to begin immediately from Wednesday even as Intel launches the P-III on February 26 in Mumbai. AMD has already begun shipments of the 400 mhz K6-III while it is still sampling the 450 mhz chip to OEM customers. The company has said that desktop systems based on K6-III processor will be available from leading PC makers such as Compaq.

P-III will have a peak performance of 2 gigaflops at 500 mhz. K6-III outperforms P-III processor by more than one speed grade on leading business and consumer applications, claims AMD, quoting Ziff-Davis Winstone 99 benchmark.

Intel P-III, codenamed Katmai New Instructions (KNI) by Intel when shipped to software developers last year, has a newly created set of x86 multimedia instructions. However, AMD's K6-IIIprocessor claims to have a six-month time-to-market advantage over KNI as its 3DNow! technology was introduced as a key feature of AMD K6-2 processor in May 1998.

As a result, it claims to enjoy a lead over P-III with a worldwide installed base of nearly 8 million K6-2 processor-based PCs. AMD also has plans to launch K7 before June.

In fact, the company has claimed that KNI is Intel's response to AMD's successful introduction of 3DNow! technology, the first innovation to the x86 processor architecture that significantly enhances 3D graphics and multimedia performance for Windows compatible PCs.

Based on publicly available data, AMD has drawn out more similarities than differences in the two chips. Although Intel has disclosed that KNI comprises approximately 70 new instructions, AMD says that the 3DNow! technology instruction set has comparable floating point performance features versus KNI while avoiding the complexity of requiring operating system support for new registers.

Both instruction setstarget single precision floating point single instruction multiple data (SIMD) operations. SIMD is a method of programming first introduced for the x86 architecture through MMX technology and enables multiple operations to be performed per processor instruction. Both KNI and K6-III are mixable with MMX and both allow code to intermix MMX and SIMD floating point instructions as needed in a single algorithm with no penalties. Both support data prefetching which offers software mechanism for bringing data into the cache before actually called for.

AMD claims that P-III is not operating system independents which means it might require upgrading of current Windows version. Windows '98 may have to be patched up to support the new register set that KNI requires to operate. In comparison, 3DNow! technology runs without modifications to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.x.

3DNow! technology is already supported in Microsoft's DirectX 6.0API and in software titles that take advantage of API. AMD andMicrosoft have announced that DirectX 6.0 API released in August last year contains Direct3D optimisations for 3DNow! technology. Many forthcoming game titles are expected to depend on Direct3D for 3D geometry operations, which AMD claims P-III will not support.

AMD has also claimed that its K6-2 processor family with 3DNow! technology spans the complete range of desktop computers beginning from sub-$1,000 PCs to the high-performance multimedia systems, while Intel is expected to position P-III only for the high-end desktop PCs initially. A 450 mhz P-III processor is being expected to be introduced at $650 and hence expected to garner only a small percentage of desktop PCs initially. The K6-III 450 mhz processor is priced at $476 while the 400 version will be available for $284, each in 1,000 unit quantities.