AMD K6-3 reviewed before public release

AnandTech and Sharky Extreme have published the first K6-3 evaluations with alpha-silicon... and the K6-3 screams at around 10% faster than the equivalent frequency Pentium II. It includes an on-board 256 Kb L2 cache while making the L2 on your motherboard become an L3 cache running at 100Mhz (improving performance by an additional 5%). An additional CXT write combination mode should also increase performance. With a total of 64+256+512 = 832Kb of cache, I expect kernel compilations will fly. Looks like Intel will find it difficult to knock AMD out of the sub-$1000 market, although the pricing pressure should keep buyers happy. Nevertheless initial K6-3 prices are rumoured to be around $350.