The first Athlon hit the market on 21th of August 1999 and impressed many enthusiasts by it's performance. The AMD K6-2 was not bad but suffered from a slow floating point unit (FPU) and didn't scale well beyond 500MHz ~ 550MHz. AMD needed something new and the Athlon was perfect!

Basically the Athlon was a major rework of the K6 core. It also ran on the Alpha EV6 bus which increased overall speed as the bus is much faster than the one on the old socket 7 motherboards. Along with the faster FPU and a big 128KB L1 cache the Athlon did it's job very well. > Read more