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

A normal AMD Athlon CPU, one you could buy in the stores in the end of the millennium year.

The AMD Athlon is known to run quite hot. They did compared to the Pentium III. The Pentium 4 'Willamette' is much cooler in idle modus but in stressed they consume a lot of power, too. Fact that the Athlon runs hot is true. The fact that they can handle much heat is also true. It's not uncommon that an AMD Athlon can run at 70C or higher with ease. All that is needed is a good heat transfer between the 'die' of de CPU and the heatsink.

Look at the picture to see a pretty much banged up CPU. I suspect that the previous owner used to run this CPU in quite a hot environment. Compare the discoloration with this Athlon 1000! Also note that the 'die' of this Athlon 850 is not perfect anymore. Yet it works fine.

People often refer to 'core' when they see the tiny chip on the ceramic packaging of the Athlon. I refer to 'die' as the thing you see is a 'die', the actual 'core' is inside this 'die'. The 'die' is used to protect the 'core' and to transfer heat from the 'core' to the surface of the 'die' on which a heatsink can be installed. Damages to the 'die' doesn't mean the 'core' is damaged, meaning the CPU can still function! But be careful as the spot which is damaged can suffer from overheating as the damaged 'die' might not have full contact with the heatsink anymore. > Read more

Technically this slot A model is the same as this socket A (462) Athlon 850. Both have the 'Thunderbird' core with 256KB on-die full speed L2 cache.

The 850MHz Slot A Athlon exists in two versions. One has the Thunderbird core, the other a Pluto core. The latter is like this Athlon 500 with 512KB off-die L2 cache. The 500MHz model has L2 cache on 1/2 of the core frequency and the 850MHz model has 1/3. > Read more

The AMD Athlon 1000 on Slot A (one full 1GHz!) saw it's daylight at monday 6 March 2000. Note that this CPU is different as it has 256KB on-die L2 cache instead of 512KB off-die L2 cache. Almost everyone was excited about the first x86 1GHz CPU. AMD's stock raised from 5,94 dollar to 47,94 dollar. Though the first 1GHz Athlon wasn't sold much at that time. One had to pay 1299 dollar per CPU which is quite steep. And above all, the CPU was only shipped to Compaq and Gateway till April. > Read more

Like this Athlon 1000 but then running at 1333MHz. It's almost the fastest Athlon 'Thunderbird' CPU one can get and in my opinion the number 1333 looks great. Back then it offered enough power leaving the Pentium 4 nowhere. > Read more

The fastest Athlon 'Thunderbird' out there. At the time this was considered a real hot CPU in thermal-terms. People ofted blamed AMD for being having hot running CPU's but as processors got faster the heat output also increased. Years later CPU's like the Athlon64 6000+ and Pentium 4 'Prescott' generated a lot more heat than this 1400MHz Athlon 'Thunderbird'. I guess it just needs time for people to get used to excessive heat output but they will get used to it eventually.

Also notice the 'die' on the photo. It's a bit chipped but the CPU still works . > Read more