Thanks to a complete rethink of the way floating point operations should be handled, combined with a virtually limitless engineering mandate to create a fully new design from the ground up, the Athlon offers the world's first pipelined and superscaled [?] floating point unit.

Because of this, the FPU on the Athlon CPUs can simultaneously support up to three multimedia or floating point instructions at one time, versus a single instruction on a competitor's FPU.

With their FPU problems solved, AMD sought to cement the multiprocessor capabilities of the Athlon, and for that they looked at outside sources.