More phenomenal AMD marketing?
 

You have to give it to AMD, there is only one aspect of marketing they mastered throughout the years and that is picking really catchy product and code names. The AMD Athlon, which is ancient Greek for 'champion of the games', a processor first introduced in 1999, comes to mind for example. The Athlon processor heralded the return of AMD to the performance area that was previously dominated by Intel with its Pentium III. The second generation Athlon processor, based on the Thunderbird core, continued that success and was the most successful AMD product to date.

After the Thunderbird's success Intel's Pentium 4 processors slowly started to gain on AMD's offerings, making it harder for the fourth generation of Athlon, code named Thoroughbred, to maintain their performance lead. However with the eighth generation of the Athlon processor, dubbed the Athlon 64, AMD delivered another sensitive blow to Intel's market position. The Athlon 64, adeptly code-named the Hammer, offered support for 64-bit computing, a first on the desktop, along with a performance level that surpassed Intel's. Even Intel's Extreme Edition Pentium 4, which was released days after the launch of the Athlon 64, could not match its performance and was dubbed 'Emergency Edition' by some.

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/cont...amd-marketing/