The summer of 1999 wasn’t a great time for Intel, and it really should have been. In February it had launched the Pentium III, a supercharged upgrade of the P6 microarchitecture. Cyrix, whose 6x86 processors had embarrassed some 1st-generation Pentiums, was effectively finished, its tech now in the hands of VIA Technologies. That just left AMD, whose K6 line of processors had captured some of the budget PC market, but didn’t have the optimised pipelines, cache or floating point performance to give Intel any serious competition.
But when AMD released its first K7 Athlon processors to reviewers in June, something unexpected happened. Sure, there was already some buzz about the new ‘K7’ CPU, thanks to intriguing early demos and briefings, but a Pentium III killer? Not likely. Yet when the…