Athlon

Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor. The original Athlon was the first desktop processor to reach speeds of one gigahertz (GHz). AMD has continued using the Athlon name with the Athlon 64, an eighth-generation processor featuring x86-64 (later renamed AMD64) architecture, and the Athlon II.

The Athlon made its debut on June 23, 1999. Athlon comes from the Greek άθλος (athlos) meaning ″contest″.

Background

AMD founder (and then-CEO) Jerry Sanders aggressively pursued strategic partnerships and engineering talent in the late 1990s, desiring to leverage the success AMD had gained in the PC market with the preceding AMD K6 line of processors. One major partnership announced in 1998 paired AMD with semiconductor giant Motorola to co-develop copper-based semiconductor technology, and resulted with the K7 project being the first commercial processor to utilize copper fabrication technology. In the announcement, Sanders referred to the partnership as creating a "virtual gorilla" that would enable AMD to compete with Intel on fabrication capacity while limiting AMD's financial outlay for new facilities.

Athlon (steamboat)

Athlon was a typical passenger steamboat of the Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet.

Construction

Athlon was built in Portland, Oregon by the J.H. Johnston yard. Her first owners were a consortium of Jacob Kamm (and his company, Vancouver Transportation Co.), Shaver Transportation Company and the Kellogg Transportation Company. The consortium built her at a cost of $4,950. The consortium's purpose was to Captain Neusome, owner of the Iralda, which he ran on the lower Columbia. Neusome had refused to fix (or “cooperate on,” as the phrase then was) steamboat rates on river. Neusome came around when Athlon was launched, and struck a deal with the consortium. In return, Athlon was sold to H.B. Kennedy, who took her up to Puget Sound.

Operations on Puget Sound

Once at Puget Sound, H.B. Kennedy put Athlon on the popular Seattle-Port Orchard (Navy Yard) Route, in competition with Joshua Green’s boat, the Inland Flyer. Athlon’s first captain on Puget Sound, in February 1901, was William Mitchell, who had worked his way up from cabin boy. (Mitchell eventually in 1933 became manager of the Kitsap Transportation Company, one of the last remaining competitors to the by-then dominant Puget Sound Navigation Company.) By July 1901, H.B. Kennedy and Joshua Green reached a deal to end competition between their two boats, fixing rates on the route as was usual with these anti-competitive agreements. Over the years, the firms of H.B. Kennedy and Joshua Green's Puget Sound Navigation Company drew closer together and eventually merged. By 1903, Athlon was still owned by H.B. Kennedy personally, but was being operated by Puget Sound Navigation. This combination drove off all would be competitors including the Manette, and later, Arrow, even though Arrow was a much faster boat than Athlon, beating her by 30 minutes on a race from Seattle to Bremerton.

Athlon 64

The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation, AMD64-architecture microprocessor produced by AMD, released on September 23, 2003. It is the third processor to bear the name Athlon, and the immediate successor to the Athlon XP. The second processor (after the Opteron) to implement AMD64 architecture and the first 64-bit processor targeted at the average consumer, it was AMD's primary consumer microprocessor, and competes primarily with Intel's Pentium 4, especially the "Prescott" and "Cedar Mill" core revisions. It is AMD's first K8, eighth-generation processor core for desktop and mobile computers. Despite being natively 64-bit, the AMD64 architecture is backward-compatible with 32-bit x86 instructions. Athlon 64s have been produced for Socket 754, Socket 939, Socket 940 and Socket AM2. The line was succeeded by the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon X2 lines.

Background