Athlon

Athlon, a popular microprocessor from AMD that is used in many personal computers, was the first processor to be shipped in a 1 gigahertz (one billion clock speed ) version. Compaq and Gateway are among companies that will manufacture computers that include the 1 GHz Athlon. Athlon also comes in versions that have clock speeds somewhat below 1 GHz.

The second largest maker of microprocessors after Intel, AMD has gained on its rival in recent years. The Athlon achieved favorable press reviews for its speed and cost when compared to Intel's Pentium 3 . Athlon has an x86 -compatible processor architecture that comes with a fully pipelining , superscalar floating point unit , a 128 kilobyte L1 and L2 that is built into the microprocessor chip, and a programmable backside bus to a L1 and L2 . A notable feature is the system's 200 MHz bus . The Athlon chip uses AMD's aluminum 0.18- micron technology.

As the successor to AMD's K6 microprocessor, Athlon was previously called the K7.