Athlon

Athlon is a brand name that is used for a series of different x86 processors designed and manufactured by American manufacturer AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.). The brand was introduced on 23rd June 1999. The Athlon (K7) processor was introduced by the company in August 1999. Later, the company produced 180-nanometer processors. The Athlon processor makes use of the DEC Alpha EV6 bus architecture with double data rate (DDR) technology. Due to this technology, the Athlon front side bus at 100 MHz, actually transfers data at a rate similar to a 200 MHz single data rate bus. The first, seventh-generation x86 processor was known as Athlon Classic or the original Athlon. It was a cartridge-based processor and was launched on June 23, 1999.

Thunderbird (T-Bird) was the second generation Athlon that was launched on 5th June 2000. These were available at speeds ranging from 600 to 1400 MHz. It's cache design was considerably different. In it, the L1 cache's contents were not duplicated in the L2. This increased the total cache size of the processor. It had the 64-bit L2 cache data bus and had a high latency. The third major Athlon version code-named "Palomino" was introduced in 2001. It was named Athlon XP and was the third major Athlon version. The fourth generation Athlon was Thoroughbred (T-Bred) released in 2002. Barton and Thorton was the fifth generation Anthon.