TIL: The AMD K5 was RISC
AMD K5 CPU About 28 years ago (?!) I ran a Linux server for a small college. We always had a shoestring budget so our hardware setup was always just a bit non-mainstream. (I also didn’t know what I was doing half the time, so, like, we had a generic NE2000 ISA Ethernet card (something like this ) providing connectivity, until I realized how CPU-bound that made network activity; upgrading to a 3Com 3C905 PCI board with bus mastering was amazing.) I built pretty much all of the systems we used, servers and workstations, and my first Linux box started off as a Pentium 60, before we migrated it to an AMD K5 PR133 on, IIRC, an Intel i430FX chipset. I remember it being a fine performer, especially once we had the network interface card performance figured out. Today I learned: “The K5 was based upon an internal highly parallel RISC processor architecture with an x86 decoding front-end.” ( Wikipedia ) Also TIL, AMD made RISC microprocessors, and used their internal design, the Am29000, whic...