AMD Athlon

Historia

The Athlon made its debut on August 21, 1999. The original Athlon core revision, codenamed K7, was available in speeds of 500 to 650 MHz at its introduction and was later sold at speeds up to 1000 MHz. Internally, the Athlon was essentially a major reworking of the K6 processor core designed for compatibility with the EV6 bus protocol (first used on DECs Alpha 21264 RISC processor). AMD dramatically improved the floating-point unit from the K6 and put a large 128K level 1 cache on the chip. Like on the Intel Pentium II there was 512k of secondary cache, mounted on the CPU module and running at a lower speed than the core. The resulting processor was the fastest x86 in the world. Various different versions of the Athlon held this distinction continuously from August 1999 until January 2002.