In het kort samengevat, Anand Lai Shimpi's preview.
source:AnandTech.
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"Windows 98 has always been the Pentium II's domain in terms of overall performance simply because its L2 cache performance would increase with every clock increase, unlike the K6-2. With the the L2 cache of the K6-3 being on-chip, Intel has been booted from the top of the charts, and replaced by the third generation K6 processor. At 350MHz, the K6-3 gives the Pentium II 450 and Celeron 450A a run for their money, at 400MHz AMD already has the fastest business processor, and at 450MHz, the K6-3 sees no competition at all. Even under Winstone99, a benchmark that seems to perform better on Intel processors/chipsets, the K6-3 still comes out on top by a fairly large margin. An 8% performance differential exists between the K6-3 450 and a Pentium II 450 under Winstone99, a difference that is expressed as a 12% gap under Winstone98. The bottom line? The K6-3, clock for clock, is, without a doubt, faster than the Pentium II in business applications. The larger cache of the Pentium II (512KB) does give the edge over the K6-3 in terms of disk troughput and overall disk performance, however the separation isn't noticeable enough to deem unacceptable from AMD's standpoint. This is nothing more than an illustration of the 512KB L2 running at 50% clockspeed vs 256KB L2 running at clockspeed comparison made earlier in the article, from a disk perspective that is. Quake 2 is truly the best case scenario when it comes to 3DNow! implementation in a game. AMD spent months working on the driver for Quake 2, and the results of their efforts are outstanding. The K6-3 is a solid gaming performer, even outrunning the Intel processors in the CPU intensive crusher.dm2 test, and leading the pack in both benchmark runs. Turning off the precious 3DNow! compatibility causes those frames rates to drop around 20 fps illustrating the dire need for 3DNow! support in games in order for the K6-2 & K6-3 to survive. Without the 3Dfx card to rely on, the picture doesn't change at all. The K6-3 is still strong in spite of the lack of any hardware accelerators to take the load off of the processor itself. But all of this Quake 2 talk is quite idealistic since the implementation of 3DNow! in Quake 2 is very unrealistic compared to most other games, let's see how things look trough the fog in Unreal, one of the most taxing games for an entire system (one of the reasons why it wasn't a big seller). The benefits of the K6-3's L2 cache are seen once again with the performance of the K6-3 under the L2 cache-happy Unreal benchmark."
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