The Amd-K6 3d Processor

Not merely one of the "other chipmakers," Advanced Micro Devices has become a real player in the battle to define personal desktop computing power. The company's AMD-K6 3D central processing unit, compatible with x86 machine language and the Multimedia Extensions (MMX) instruction set, appears to compete favorably with Intel's Pentium II flagship. The AMD-K6 3D Processor provides page upon page of deeply technical details about the AMD-K6 3D chip, providing a valuable resource for motherboard designers, compiler makers, serious hardware hobbyists, and others interested in the workings of this central processing unit.

And it is deeply technical. Not only does this book contain lots of schematics that explain how the chip goes about decoding instructions, but it contains lots of prose, too. But the internal architecture is only a small part of the book. The chip's pinouts get tons of detailed coverage--you'll find depictions of the waveforms you ought to see on an oscilloscope as certain operations take place, for example. You also get full documentation of the chip's machine language, particularly that portion relevant to 3-D processing operations. There's coverage of floating-point operations, cache management, bus signals, and the chip's debugging modes. To top off this compilation of engineering data, there's a lucid foreword by PC Magazine pundit John Dvorak. --David Wall