Athlon

Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by AMD. The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the first desktop processor to reach speeds of one gigahertz (GHz). It made its debut as AMD's high-end processor brand on June 23, 1999. Over the years AMD has used the Athlon name with the 64-bit Athlon 64 architecture, the Athlon II, and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) chips targeting the Socket AM1 desktop SoC architecture, and Socket AM4 Zen microarchitecture. The modern Zen-based Athlon with a Radeon Graphics processor was introduced in 2019 as AMD's highest-performance entry-level processor.

This article is about the microprocessors. For the sports magazine, see Athlon Sports. For the 2016 Marsheaux album, see Ath.Lon.

Athlon comes from the Ancient Greek ἆθλον (athlon), meaning "(sport) contest", or "prize of a contest", or "place of a contest; arena". With the Athlon name originally used for AMD's high-end processors, AMD currently uses Athlon for budget APUs with integrated graphics. AMD positions the Athlon against its rival, the Intel Pentium.

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