[1] The K5 offered good x86 compatibility and the in-house-developed test suite proved invaluable on later projects.

[3][4] The floating-point transcendental instructions were implemented in hardware and were faithful to true mathematical results for all operands.

The low clock rates were, in part, due to AMD's limitations as a "cutting edge" manufacturing company at the time, and in part due to the design itself, which had many levels of logic for the process technology of the day, hampering clock scaling.

Additionally, while the K5's floating-point performance was regarded as superior to that of the Cyrix 6x86,[clarification needed] it was slower than that of the Pentium, although offering more reliable transcendental function results.

Because it was late to market and did not meet performance expectations, the K5 never gained the acceptance among large computer manufacturers that the earlier Am486 and later AMD K6 enjoyed.