Actually, the there is another more important
reason the name changed from
K7 to
Athlon, but also to do with
marketing --
AMD had prior to the
Althon released the
K6,
K6-2, and
K6-3, All which have garnered a bad rap due to their dismal (and I mean dismal)
fpp (floating point processing). Basically, their lack of a good
fpp made them rather pathetic when compared to the likes of the
PII and
PIII. So, obviously
AMD wasn't too keen on keeping this image, and seeing that the processor was basically built from the ground up, has a brilliant
fpp this time around, and is exceedingly fast and
scalable, they thought maybe a name change would eliminate some
stigma and help get them some market share.
A year and a half later, we can definitely say it worked,
AMD has almost triple the market share they did in '98 and still gaining.
Go team.