The K6-2 was designed as a competitor to Intel's flagship processor, the significantly more expensive Pentium II.

The K6-2 was a very financially successful chip and enabled AMD to earn the revenue it would need to introduce the forthcoming Athlon.

It rapidly established an excellent reputation in the marketplace and offered a favorable price/performance ratio versus Intel's Celeron 300A.

While the K6-2 had mediocre floating-point performance compared to the Celeron, it offered faster system RAM access (courtesy of the Super 7 mainboard), as well as 3DNow graphics extensions.

By the time the 450 and the 500 were mainstream parts, the K6-2 family had already moved to the budget PC segment, where it still competed successfully against Intel's Celeron.