The previous Intel CPUs of the P6 family, from Pentium Pro to Pentium III, required 2 clock cycles for that, i.e. they reached at most half the throughput of Athlon at the same clock frequency. And Athlon had an even higher clock frequency.

So the launch of Athlon was one of the greatest jumps in floating-point performance per socket in the history of x86 CPUs.

It had a higher clock frequency than any Alpha. IBM POWER CPUs could do much more per clock cycle than Athlon, but their clock frequency was much lower, so Athlon was still faster.

One year and a half later Intel launched Pentium 4, which could match the throughput per clock cycle of Athlon, but only when executing new SSE2 programs, not when executing any legacy program.

> We rapidly concluded the DEC Alpha-based systems served our batch-processing needs very well. They provide extremely high floating-point performance in commodity packaging. We were able to identify certain floating-point-intensive applications as port targets. The Alpha systems could be configured with large amounts of memory and fast networking at extremely attractive price points. Overall, the DEC Alpha had the best price/performance match for our needs. [...]

> At this point, the decision was made to purchase 160 433MHz DEC Alpha systems from Carrera Computers of Newport Beach, California. Of those 160 machines, 105 of the machines are running Linux, the other 55 are running NT. The machines are connected with 100Mbps Ethernet to each other and to the rest of our facility. [...]

> The floating-point power of the DEC Alpha made jobs run about 3.5 times faster than on our old SGI systems.