Athlon

The last processor I will discuss is the popular Athlon and Athlon 64 processor series (or K7 and K8).

It was a big effort on the part of the relatively small manufacturer, AMD, when they challenged the giant Intel with a complete new processor design.

The first models were released in 1999, at a time when Intel was the completely dominant supplier of PC processors. AMD set their sights high – they wanted to make a better processor than the Pentium II, and yet cheaper at the same time. There was a fierce battle between AMD and Intel between 1999 and 2001, and one would have to say that AMD was the victor. They certainly took a large part of the market from Intel.

The original 1999 Athlon was very powerfully equipped with pipelines and computing units:

Three instruction decoders which translated X86 program CISC instructions into the more efficient RISC instructions (ROP’s) – 9 of which could be executed at the same time. Could handle up to 72 instructions (ROP out of order) at the same time (the Pentium III could manage 40, the K6-2 only 24). Very strong FPU performance, with three simultaneous instructions. All in all, the Athlon was in a class above the Pentium II and III in those years. Since Athlon processors were sold at competitive prices, they were incredibly successful. They also launched the Duron line of processors, as the counterpart to Intel’s Celeron, and were just as successful with it.