AMD pins hopes on K6-2

AMD chief executive Jerry Sanders has fought off attempts by shareholders to topple him from the company he founded.

At a meeting in New York last week, AMD shareholders ruled out proposals by a large Californian pension fund that he should be replaced by an independent chairman.

Officials at the Calpers fund - the largest private pension in the world - complained that shares had not delivered the performance it had expected.

At the same meeting, Sanders affirmed he was still aggressively fighting Intel and renamed the Intel clone processor, the K6-3D, as the K6-2. This chip, particularly targeted at the games market, will be released at the end of May at a clock speed of 300MHz.

Sanders claimed it would beat the performance of Intel's current fastest processor, the Pentium II 400MHz.

The K6-2 will be launched with a 100MHz bus, but AMD claimed its bus technology will be faster than Intel's for games players because it takes advantage of hardware to render complex graphics.

According to Sanders, AMD will ramp up the production of the K6-2 in the second half of this year and will also introduce faster processors with larger numbers of transistors for floating point operations.

In the first half of next year, Sanders said, AMD is on target to introduce its Slot A technology, using a fast Alpha bus, which the company licensed from Digital Equipment before Intel took a financial interest in that business.