AMD Athlon 64 2800+

A very early pre-release version of the Athlon 64. It has been manufactured in late 2002 which is almost 10 months before the launch of the Athlon 64. The release versions are stepping C0 and this particular CPU is B0. The clock-frequency and cache of this CPU are different to the release version. This runs at 1600MHz with 1MB L2 and the release runs at 1800MHz with 512KB L2.

I'm not sure why AMD released this CPU without engineering sample markings. Somewhere I have a feeling they wanted to release the platform but didn't have it ironed out enough. A platform needs a solid chipset, availability of motherboards and CPU's that can attain a certain level of performance (and early Athlon 64's didn't clock that high).