AMD’s K6-III ‘Sharptooth’ arrived this week in 1999 featuring integrated L2 cache to maul the Intel Pentium II — it also stood its ground against the Pentium III

I'm pretty sure this is what the first PC my family went out and bought had in it. I can't remember which clock speed version it was. Back then games were more hit or miss with compatibility with your hardware and drivers so it couldn't run everything but when it all worked it was a beast.

I have one of the last APUs with 3DNow!

Hmm looks like L1 and L2 cache sizes have not changed since that era, which looks kinda weird I may say:) There is only L3 being introduced in bigger sizes..

I believe I pretty near had every leading edge CPU that would fit into socket 5 and 7, some with the adapter that allowed you to run socket 7 CPUs on a socket 5 mainboard. And since they came out with a new one every few months, that was quite a few. I can't really remember what I did with the older ones... Each upgrade was relatively cheap, but they accumulated.

Just like I had every CPU that would fit into socket 3, including the overdrive variant (and an overdrive CPU to go with it): my first Intel was a 80286 overclocked to 8 MHz (1 MHz 6502 before that).

On one hand they were super cool, because just swapping out the CPU gave you an extra boost. Had a K5, might have gone directly to a K6-II, but with nearly every speed rank, up to 550MHz. And that was a bit of a bummer, because switching to the K6-III meant you had to trade clocks for the on-chip L2 cache (only 450MHz on the 250nm process size), something Intel needed a "CPU slot" for. My final K6-III+ (back to 550MHz), became a bit unstable at the speed, it was finally time to change.

The 32-bit wide RAM had limited bandwidth, Northbridge chips RAM capacity limitations, and on the I/O side there was an 8-MHz 16-bit ISA bus, that went with those mainboards... Eventually socket 7 just became too many bottlenecks, especially since I started to play with GUIs, graphics accelerators, and virtual machines on VMware (1.0, which used code morphing, since hardware support came later). I believe 64MB RAM capacity was a hard limit with all my socket X boards, enough to run NT 3.51 with a Linux VM or vice versa, but not for long.

I sat out the whole slotted CPU era (where both Intel and AMD used CPU boards to fit SRAM caches), and then went to socket 754 and 939 very quickly to leave all those tiny bottlenecks behind. EISA, VESA local bus and AGP had been a real pain, micro channel obviously worse, PCI ok but PCIe finally so much better, even if RAM became a complete write-off far too frequently, considering the price.

Since the Pentium Overdrive at 83MHz they all needed a fan (unlike all earlier CPUs from 6502 to 80486DX4), but those were still tiny, nothing you'd have to budget your power supply for, or select a chassis for aero dynamic qualities. In fact systems back then often had so many add-in cards and cables, they were an authentic jungle, but heat was rarely an issue... At least after those first-generation BiCMOS Pentiums at 800nm, which tended to unsolder themselves at 66MHz and 5 Volt power.

Looking back it seems I was under the hood of my PCs pretty near every day, while today some systems may not be openend for months and then perhaps more to clean out dust than swap out parts. But I also had mostly one, perhaps two, not dozens of physical systems in the home-lab/family-home.