Developing the AMD-K5 architecture

AMD engineers developed the K5 microarchitecture for AMD´s first home grown x86-compatible microprocessor. We designed it to not only compete with Intel Pentium-class processors but, more importantly, to establish a baseline microarchitecture and implementation for ongoing development of a family of leading-edge x86-compatible microprocessors. The resulting AMD5K86 products can decode and issue up to four x86 instructions per cycle, with full out-of-order dependency-driven execution that takes place speculatively beyond unresolved branches. As a first-time, independent x86 implementation, the K5 microprocessor presented many unique challenges and constraints to its designers