The 10th Febrauary 2003 saw AMD launch the last major revision of it’s K7 “Athlon” family in the form of the “Barton”. Recent news reports have indicated that AMD is not set to release it’s next generation 64-bit “Hammer” based Athlon 64 until September of this year which means that the current 32-bit K7 derived Athlon must soldier on until then in face in increasing competition from the ever increasingly impressive Intel Pentium 4.

AMD have released their latest “Barton” core Athlon XP processor just as the Athlon XP appeared to be running out of steam with the relatively low-yielding “Thoroughbred” which has only achieved clock speeds of 2.25 Ghz and was rated as the Athlon XP 2800+. In many respects the Athlon XP appears to be running towards the end of it’s design life as higher clock speeds are becoming increasingly hard for AMD to attain with it’s now four year old architecture. That said, the AMD Athlon has been spectacularly successful in clock speed scaling having risen to 2.1 Ghz from what now appears to be a rather lowly 500 MHz at launch. During this period there have been a number of significant revisions and design changes to the AMD Athlon. These have been:

Athlon History.