Athlon 64

The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation, AMD64 architecture microprocessor produced by AMD, released on September 23, 2003.^[1] It is the third processor to bear the name Athlon, and the immediate successor to the Athlon XP.^[2] The second processor (after the Opteron) to implement AMD64 architecture and the first 64-bit processor targeted at the average consumer,^[3] it is AMD's primary consumer microprocessor, and competes primarily with Intel's Pentium 4, especially the "Prescott" and "Cedar Mill" core revisions. It is AMD's first K8, eighth-generation processor core for desktop and mobile computers.^[4] Despite being natively 64-bit, the AMD64 architecture is backward-compatible with 32-bit x86 instructions.^[5] Athlon 64s have been produced for Socket 754, Socket 939, Socket 940, and Socket AM2.