AMD's evergreen Athlon lives on as a bridge to Zen chips

In the early 2000s, AMD's Athlon chips rocked the PC market with innovative features like 64-bit processing capabilities, and Intel had to scramble to catch up.

Today, the Athlon brand remains alive and well, though AMD's scrappy underdog reputation has taken a hit as it has lost market share to Intel. AMD wants to rekindle its PC glory days with upcoming Zen chips later this year, and hopes a new Athlon chip will hold the interest of budget-conscious gamers until then.

AMD's new Athlon X4 880K chip is for gaming desktops under $500. The unlocked quad-core chip runs at a frequency of 4.2GHz and can be overclocked, a feature appreciated by gamers.

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