To understand the community interest in K8, it's necessary to look back to 1999 and the launch of the K7. The Athlon looked good on paper, but there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical about how the shipping product would perform. While AMD had achieved some measure of success with the K6 and K6-2 line of processors, the K6-3's were scaling poorly and the Socket 7 platform was running out of steam. The company also had a reputation for promising much more than it could actually deliver and suffered notoriously from manufacturing problems and delivery issues. As Athlon neared launch, no one quite knew what to expect. Would K7 deliver—or would it sink like a stone?