PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon — AMD hit marketing gold with its 1 GHz Athlon, beat Intel by a nose

On March 7, 2000, AMD shipped the world's first 1 GHz consumer processor, the Athlon, beating Intel to the milestone by two days and launching the Gigahertz era in PC computing. AMD CEO W.J. Sanders III compared the achievement to breaking the sound barrier. The chip was a Slot A design built on 180nm process with 22 million transistors, 65W TDP, and launched at $1,299. Intel scrambled to paper-launch its 1 GHz Pentium III two days later but faced severe supply constraints for months. The piece also touches on the Athlon's overclocking potential via the Golden Finger Device and notes that many lower-clocked Athlon models were simply downclocked 750 MHz chips.