The Chip That Changed the World: AMD's 64-bit FX-51, Ten Years Later

Dputiger writes "It's been a decade since AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 debuted — and launched the 64-bit x86 extensions that power the desktop and laptop world today. After a year of being bludgeoned by the P4, AMD roared back with a vengeance, kicking off a brief golden age for its own products, and seizing significant market share in desktops and servers." Although the Opteron was around before, it cost a pretty penny. I'm not sure it's fair to say that the P4 was really bludgeoning the Athlon XP though (higher clock speeds, but NetBurst is everyone's favorite Intel microarchitecture to hate). Check out the Athlon 64 FX review roundup from 2003.

Comments

Those bastards

[LodCrappo]

Apple just released a 64bit processor, and now AMD is copying it TEN YEARS ago?!?

Can the industry please do something original and quit just following wherever Apple leads it?

Re:The old days

[yurtinus]

Y'know, I was enjoying reading all the little nuggets of wisdom (Video cards that could use as much as 512 mb of address space, $700 for 2GB of RAM). Then I was thinking "hey, the computer I had before this one was an Athlon 64, it wasn't *that* long ago!" Then I realized it was. Then I felt old. Now I'm crying.