AMD Athlon a struggle, a game – it's all Geek to us

Updated After an exhaustive struggle to win the prize of guessing the new name of the K7 we have to confess it's all geek to us. Athlon is a Greek word, meaning struggle, prize and the game, but Alereon, as far as we can figure it, isn't Greek. It might be Geek. However, the latter name, as revealed here, is already registered by AMD but the site is not yet up. There is also a site called AMDATHLON.COM which is under construction in around seven languages but this one is registered by one PATTISHALL,MCAULISSE... at the unlikely address of South Wacker Drive in Chicago -- to the best of our knowledge not an AMD address. We attempted to persuade our usual sources (European AMD distributors) to spill the beans on the new name but they insist that even they haven't been told. K7 is, actually a better name for the microprocessor, some people think. We thought so too, until the following email tipped up. One of our regular German readers writes in the following vein: "For business reasons I am sometimes in Brussels/Belgium and my employer most of the times reserves a hotel for me just in the near of the red light district. And when you cross this district, you cannot overlook the signs of the sex-shops on which K7-videos are advertised. As far as I can remember it seemed that this means homosexual videos. But I am not sure. So it is possible that K 7 has a dubious meaning at least in Belgium, but also maybe in the neighbor-countries (France?), which makes it hard for AMD to use this name." He's wrong however. A number of French readers have pointed out that K7 is the accepted abbreviation for cassette, because of its similarity to the pronunciation. We're still not sure why his employers send him to the Red Light district though... And K10 is also amusing in French. Oops. In that case... ®