In 1999 AMD finally beat Intel for the first time, with the Athlon, its seventh generation x86 microprocessor. The Athlon line wouldn’t always best Intel’s Pentium line, but for a while it did. The first Athlon chip was also the first microprocessor to hit a speed of 1 GHz. Then, in 2003, AMD managed to put out a 64-bit x86 chip before Intel. The Opteron, complete with 105 million transistors, became a mainstay in servers and workstations. The Athlon 64 followed a few months later, and was the first 64-bit chip aimed squarely at regular consumers.