Introduction

I still remember the time when AMD showed their 'K7 Roadmap' for the first time at Microprocessor Forum 1998. On this roadmap we could see the, by that time still 'nameless', future 'K7'-CPU in several variations. The specs of the 'K7', as it was still called back then, sounded pretty impressive and I speculated that this CPU could indeed be able to give Intel a really hard time once it's released. Still, there weren't a whole lot of people who believed that AMD would finally pull off a product that could indeed threaten Intel's monopoly. Therefore hardly anybody cared about the special 'K7'-version, which AMD planned to use as their future low-cost solution. In 1998 most of AMD's processors were seen as low-cost alternative to Intel's high-performance/high-price CPUs, so it seemed rather pathetic that AMD would plan a product that was particularly targeted to this segment. Back then most people thought that AMD should consider itself lucky if any of their processors would at least sell in this low-cost segment.