AMD’s First Dual-Core Athlon, Phenomedia From 400M to Zero (PCGH-Retro 01 Aug)

…2002: The principle of the game was very simple, the presentation not too serious – and both factors together with the almost everywhere availability guaranteed the enormous spread of the game: Moorhuhn. The title was developed by the Dutch studio Witan on behalf of Art Department, one of the forerunners of Phenomedia, and initially served as a promotion for a common whiskey brand. The success of the game exceeded all expectations and also flushed Phenomedia, which had meanwhile been formed in Bochum, to the stock exchange as part of the dot-com bubble. There, the small company, like its product, exceeded all expectations and the share value inflated to as much as 400 million euros before bursting with the rest of the bubble. To make matters worse, it came out in April 2002 that the Bochum company’s figures were embellished, if not entirely fictitious. As a result, the company had to file for bankruptcy on August 1, 2002, and the CEO of the AG was sentenced to three and a half years in prison in 2009.

…2005: Two processor cores in one CPU case? The idea isn’t entirely new anymore, even in the x86 world; AMD has long since had the dual-core Opteron for servers on the market, while Intel’s Pentium D and the “Extreme Edition” brought dual-core technology to desktop PCs a few months ago. At the Aug. 1, 2005 the Athlon 64 also gets a core duplication: with the Athlon 64 X2 on a Manchester basis, which makes its debut in the form of the 3800+ model with 2 gigahertz. But the utility is still low, there are only a few programs that really use the second processor core, and the development of suitable multithreading software is only slowly getting under way. The doubling of performance hoped for by many only occurs in exceptional cases. Nevertheless, two cores will soon become the standard, both for Intel and AMD, and the Athlon successor Phenom will even be equipped with four cores as standard. The multi-core age has begun.