Rumours that AMD's K6-III is destined for the chip gulag have been scotched by the company today. Instead, AMD will roll out new variants of the K6-III during this year and will continue to develop the product, a representative of the firm has confirmed. But AMD has acknowledged that the part is not as popular in the retail market as either the K6-II or the Athlon. The representative said: "There will be variants of the K6-III well into this year. The K6-IIs have always been popular in retail products and we've yielded that microprocessor to higher speeds." He said that the K6-III continued to be successful for notebook PCs because of its integrated Level Two cache. The same reason, he said, made the K6-III popular for business applications. ®