It was marketed as a product that could perform as well as its Intel Pentium II equivalent but at a significantly lower price.

Like the AMD K5, Nx586, and Nx686 before it, the K6 translated x86 instructions on the fly into dynamic buffered sequences of micro-operations.

Initially, the AMD K6 processors used a Pentium II-based performance rating (PR2) to designate their speed.

The release of the 266 MHz version of this chip was not until the second quarter of 1998, when AMD was able to move to the 0.25-micrometre manufacturing process.

The lower voltage and higher multiplier of the K6-266 meant that it was not fully compatible with some Socket 7 motherboards, similar to the later K6-2 processors.