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Sixth Generation Processors

New and innovative architectural designs are employed in these CPUs, as the easy performance improvements such as widening buses and increasing clock speeds get harder to continue. Clock speeds do increase, but new ways of getting more done in each clock cycle are also the focus.

The line between fifth and sixth generation is much blurrier here than between previous generations, due to sixth generation chips running in fifth generation motherboards, and the mixing of technologies between different chip families. I consider the AMD K6 and the Cyrix 6x86MX to be sixth generation chips despite the fact that they run in fifth generation motherboards. This is based on assessing them technologically and in terms of their performance, along with when they were released to market.

Next: Intel Pentium Pro ("P6")

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