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The Athlon made its debut on August 21, 1999. The name "Athlon" was chosen by AMD as short for " decathlon." The original Athlon core revision, code-named "K7" (in homage to its predecessor, the K6), was available in speeds of 500 to 650 MHz at its introduction and was later sold at speeds up to 1000 MHz (K75). The processor was compatible with the industry-standard X86 instruction set and plugged into a motherboard slot mechanically similar to but not pin-compatible with the Pentium II's Slot 1.
Internally, the Athlon was essentially a major reworking of the K6 processor core designed for compatibility with the EV6 bus protocol (first used on DEC's Alpha 21264 RISC processor). AMD dramatically improved the floating-point unit from the K6 and put a large 128 KIn computing, Binary prefixes are often used to quantify large numbers where powers of two are more useful than powers of ten. They are written and pronounced identically to the SI prefixes, but each successive prefix is multiplied by 1024 (210) rather th level 1 cacheA CPU cache is a cache used by the central processing unit of a computer to reduce the average time to access memory. The cache is a smaller, faster memory which stores copies of just the most frequently used main memory locations. So long as most accesse on the chip. Like Intel's Pentium IIThe Pentium II is an x86 architecture microprocessor by Intel, introduced on May 7, 1997. It was based on a modifed version of the P6 core first used for the Pentium Pro, but with improved 16 bit performance and the addition of the MMX instructions which and Katmai Pentium IIIThe Pentium III is an x86 (more precise i686) architecture microprocessor by Intel, introduced on February 26, 1999. Initial versions were very similar to the earlier Pentium II, the most notable difference being the addition of SSE instructions. As with, there was a secondary cache of 512K, mounted externally to the chip itself but still within the CPU module, and running at a lower speed than the core: initially half-speed, but later runs at 1/3 to 2/5 of the core speed (because of cost and availability issues with very high speed cache RAM).
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 20022002 is a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). 2002 was the first palindromic year since 1991 and the last until 2112. 2002 was also designated: International Year of Ecotourism and Mountains National Science Year in the United Kingdom.
In commercial terms, the Athlon Classic was an enormous success - not just because of its own merits, but also because the normally dependable Intel endured a series of major production, design, and quality control issues at this time. In particular, Intel's transition to a 0.18 μmA micrometre ( American spelling: micrometer , symbol m is an SI unit of length. It is defined as one millionth of a metre (1×10−6 m), equivalent to one thousandth of a millimetre. The symbol µ ( Unicode character U+00B5; HTML µ) is the " micr production process, starting in late 1999 and running through to mid-2000, was chaotic, and there was a severe shortage of Pentium III parts. Many long-time Intel-only PC dealers found the combination of the Athlon's excellent performance and reasonable pricing tempting, and the prospect of being able to get stock in commercial volumes impossible to resist. In contrast, AMD enjoyed a remarkably smooth process transition, had ample supplies available, and Athlon sales went from strength to strength.