Athlon 64

The Athlon 64 is a ninth-generation, AMD64-architecture microprocessor produced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), released on September 23, 2003. It is the third processor to bear the name Athlon, the second processor to implement the AMD64 architecture (after the Opteron) and the first 64-bit processor targeted at the average consumer, itself being the successor to the Athlon XP. Variants of the Athlon 64 have been produced for Socket 754, Socket 939, Socket 940, and Socket AM2. It was AMD's primary consumer CPU, and primarily competed with Intel's Pentium 4, especially the Prescott and Cedar Mill core revisions. The Athlon 64 is AMD's first K8, eighth-generation processor core for desktop and mobile computers. Despite being natively 64-bit, the AMD64 architecture is backward-compatible with 32-bit x86 instructions. The Athlon 64 line was succeeded by the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon X2 lines.