High-performance floating point units--once considered to be necessary only for scientific, mathematical, and engineering applications running on workstations--are now used in a variety of other applications, such as modeling physical objects in motion, applying special lighting effects to complex digital images, and enabling more realistic and smoother movements of objects in 3D games.

To meet the floating point (FP) performance demands of cutting-edge, FP-intensive software applications, AMD equipped the AMD Athlon™ processor with the most powerful and architecturally advanced floating point execution engine ever implemented in an x86 microprocessor . A centerpiece of the seventh-generation AMD Athlon processor architecture, AMD's "no-compromise," superscalar floating point engine complements the capabilities of the AMD Athlon processor's enhanced 3DNow!™ technology and enables FP performance that is unparalleled in the x86 computing industry.