For years, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company designated its chip generations by the letter K. The company sold K-6 chips in the late "90s, and the Athlon and Opteron were brand names for, respectively, the K7 and K8 generations of processors. AMD"s K was a counterpart to Intel"s P designation for chip families such as the P5 (the first Pentium) and the P6, which included both the Pentium II and III.
Now, however, AMD has done away with the designation because it has launched a strategy to enter a wider variety of markets. This effort will involve simultaneously developing, and selling, chips based on different designs for separate markets. For most of its history, AMD sold one chip generation at a time and tweaked it slightly to squeeze into different markets. "We don"t really talk about K8 and K9 anymore," said Fred Weber, AMD"s chief technical officer.