Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by AMD. The original Athlon was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the first desktop processor to reach speeds of one gigahertz (GHz). It made its debut as AMD's high-end processor brand on June 23, 1999. Over the years AMD has used the Athlon name with the 64-bit Athlon 64 architecture, the Athlon II, and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) chips targeting the Socket AM1 desktop SoC architecture, and Socket AM4 Zen (microarchitecture). The modern Zen-based Athlon with a Radeon Graphics processor was introduced in 2019 as AMD's highest-performance entry-level processor.
The Cyrix 6x86 is a line of sixth-generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed and released by Cyrix in 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM and SGS-Thomson. The 6x86 was made as a direct competitor to Intel's Pentium microprocessor line, and was pin compatible. During the 6x86's development, the majority of applications performed almost entirely integer operations. The designers foresaw that future applications would most likely maintain this instruction focus. So, to optimize the chip's performance for what they believed to be the most likely application of the CPU, the integer execution resources received most of the transistor budget. This would later prove to be a strategic mistake, as the popularity of the P5 Pentium caused many software developers to hand-optimize code in assembly language, to take advantage of the P5 Pentium's tightly pipelined and lower latency FPU. For example, the highly anticipated first-person shooter Quake used highly optimized assembly code designed almost entirely around the P5 Pentium's FPU. As a result, the P5 Pentium significantly outperformed other CPUs in the game.
The K6 microprocessor was launched by AMD in 1997. The main advantage of this particular microprocessor is that it was designed to fit into existing desktop designs for Pentium-branded CPUs. It was marketed as a product that could perform as well as its Intel Pentium II equivalent but at a significantly lower price. The K6 had a considerable impact on the PC market and presented Intel with serious competition.
The Pentium is a x86 microprocessor introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993. It is the first CPU using the Pentium brand. Considered the fifth generation in the 8086 compatible line of processors, its implementation and microarchitecture was internally called P5.
x86 is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the 8086 microprocessor and its variant, the 8088. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of 8-bit Intel's 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486".
MMX is a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instruction set architecture designed by Intel, introduced on January 8, 1997 with its Pentium P5 (microarchitecture) based line of microprocessors, named "Pentium with MMX Technology". It developed out of a similar unit introduced on the Intel i860, and earlier the Intel i750 video pixel processor. MMX is a processor supplementary capability that is supported on IA-32 processors by Intel and other vendors as of 1997. AMD also added MMX instruction set in its K6 processor.
Celeron is a discontinued series of low-end IA-32 and x86-64 computer microprocessor models targeted at low-cost personal computers, manufactured by Intel. The first Celeron-branded CPU was introduced on April 15, 1998, and was based on the Pentium II.
The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture ("P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors, the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first P6-generation core of the Pentium Pro, which contained 5.5 million transistors. However, its L2 cache subsystem was a downgrade when compared to the Pentium Pros. It is a single-core microprocessor.
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications. Later, it was reduced to a more narrow role as a server and high-end desktop processor. The Pentium Pro was also used in supercomputers, most notably ASCI Red, which used two Pentium Pro CPUs on each computing node and was the first computer to reach over one teraFLOPS in 1996, holding the number one spot in the TOP500 list from 1997 to 2000.
Socket 7 is a physical and electrical specification for an x86-style CPU socket on a personal computer motherboard. It was released in June 1995. The socket supersedes the earlier Socket 5, and accepts P5 Pentium microprocessors manufactured by Intel, as well as compatibles made by Cyrix/IBM, AMD, IDT and others. Socket 7 was the only socket that supported a wide range of CPUs from different manufacturers and a wide range of speeds.
The K6-2 is an x86 microprocessor introduced by AMD on May 28, 1998, and available in speeds ranging from 266 to 550 MHz. An enhancement of the original K6, the K6-2 introduced AMD's 3DNow! SIMD instruction set and an upgraded system-bus interface called Super Socket 7, which was backward compatible with older Socket 7 motherboards. It was manufactured using a 250 nanometer process, ran at 2.2 volts, and had 9.3 million transistors.
The K6-III was an x86 microprocessor line manufactured by AMD that launched on February 22, 1999. The launch consisted of both 400 and 450 MHz models and was based on the preceding K6-2 architecture. Its improved 256 KB on-chip L2 cache gave it significant improvements in system performance over its predecessor the K6-2. The K6-III was the last processor officially released for desktop Socket 7 systems, however later mobile K6-III+ and K6-2+ processors could be run unofficially in certain socket 7 motherboards if an updated BIOS was made available for a given board. The Pentium III processor from Intel launched 6 days later.
Super Socket 7, also referred to as Super 7, is a hardware-level extension of the Socket 7 ZIF socket specification for x86 processors. Compatible motherboards and chipsets use a standard Socket 7 connection for the CPU, while adding certain features including a maximum 100 MHz front-side bus and support for AGP graphics cards.
NexGen, Inc. was a private semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD in 1996. NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other companies for production. NexGen's chips were produced by IBM's Microelectronics division in Burlington, Vermont alongside PowerPC and DRAM parts.
The WinChip series was a low-power Socket 7-based x86 processor designed by Centaur Technology and marketed by its parent company IDT.
The P6 microarchitecture is the sixth-generation Intel x86 microarchitecture, implemented by the Pentium Pro microprocessor that was introduced in November 1995. It is frequently referred to as i686. It was planned to be succeeded by the NetBurst microarchitecture used by the Pentium 4 in 2000, but was revived for the Pentium M line of microprocessors. The successor to the Pentium M variant of the P6 microarchitecture is the Core microarchitecture which in turn is also derived from P6.
Yonah is the code name of Intel's first generation 65 nm process CPU cores, based on cores of the earlier Banias / Dothan Pentium M microarchitecture. Yonah CPU cores were used within Intel's Core Solo and Core Duo mobile microprocessor products. SIMD performance on Yonah improved through the addition of SSE3 instructions and improvements to SSE and SSE2 implementations; integer performance decreased slightly due to higher latency cache. Additionally, Yonah included support for the NX bit.
Pentium is a discontinued series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium was first released on March 22, 1993. The name "Pentium" is originally derived from the Greek word pente (πεντε), meaning "five", a reference to the prior numeric naming convention of Intel's 80x86 processors (8086–80486), with the Latin ending -ium since the processor would otherwise have been named 80586 using that convention.
The Vortex86 is a computing system-on-a-chip (SoC) based on a core compatible with the x86 microprocessor family. It is produced by DM&P Electronics, but originated with Rise Technology.
