Athlon - Background

Background

AMD ex-CEO and founder Jerry Sanders developed strategic partnerships during the late 1990s to improve AMD's presence in the PC market based on the success of the AMD K6 architecture. One major partnership announced in 1998 paired AMD with semiconductor giant Motorola. In the announcement, Sanders referred to the partnership as creating a "virtual gorilla" that would enable AMD to compete with Intel on fabrication capacity while limiting AMD's financial outlay for new facilities. This partnership also helped to co-develop copper-based semiconductor technology, which would become a cornerstone of the K7 production process.

In August 1999, AMD released the Athlon (K7) processor. Notably, the design team was led by Dirk Meyer, who had worked as a lead engineer on multiple Alpha microprocessors during his employment at DEC. Jerry Sanders had approached many of the engineering staff to work for AMD as DEC wound down their semiconductor business, and brought in a near-complete team of engineering experts. The balance of the Athlon design team comprised AMD K5 and K6 veterans.

By working with Motorola, AMD was able to refine copper interconnect manufacturing to the production stage about one year before Intel. The revised process permitted 180-nanometer processor production. The accompanying die-shrink resulted in lower power consumption, permitting AMD to increase Athlon clock speeds to the 1 GHz range. Yields on the new process exceeded expectations, permitting AMD to deliver high speed chips in volume in March 2000.