Looking back at 2000 - Part 1: CPUs, Chipsets, Motherboards

The Athlon goes Mainstream

This wasn't the first time that an AMD chipset release was the cause of increased pressure from Intel.  Not many of you may remember this but AMD tried their hands at a chipset a couple of years back, the AMD 640, a Socket-7 chipset.  The only manufacturer to pursue a design based on the AMD 640 chipset was Shuttle with their HOT-603 motherboard which resulted in quite a few angry phone calls from the big brother, Intel.  Using the LX chipset as a negotiating tool, Intel effectively canned any support behind the AMD 640 chipset much like what was attempted against the AMD 750, the first Athlon chipset. 

A strengthening blow from VIA helped AMD's situation considerably.  With their release of the KX133 chipset, the first non-AMD chipset for the Athlon, motherboard manufacturers felt more comfortable promoting their Slot-A solutions.  The release of the KX133 chipset in February also marked another big win for AMD, this second generation of Slot-A motherboards were definitely much more mature than the first four motherboards that launched with the Athlon in 1999. 

By March we were able to round up a total of 11 Slot-A motherboards for the Athlon platform in our first Slot-A Motherboard Roundup.  Just a few weeks earlier, at the annual CeBIT convention in Hannover, Germany, we reported a total of twenty Slot-A motherboards being on display.  We took enough pictures and got enough data to put together a picture tour through the boards in our only piece of CeBIT Show Coverage.

With Slot-A motherboards gaining popularity, another little device became the focus of attention: the Gold Fingers Device or GFD for short.  This little device would fit over the "golden fingers" (which were actually copper) on the Slot-A Athlon's PCB and would allow for the manipulation of the Athlon's clock multiplier setting, making the Athlon one of the most overclockable CPUs we have had in quite a while.