AMD Speeds Up the Race

While Intel was showing off its new Willamette processor running at 1.5 GHz at the Intel Developers Forum, Advanced Micro Devices was doing some speeding of its own. Demonstrating a dual Athlon machine running at 1.1 GHz at room temperature, AMD has put the pressure on Intel to keep up both in speed and production levels. Other main courses on AMD's plate for this year include the Thunderbird processor featuring on-die cache, the Spitfire for sub-$1000 based PCs, and the Mustang, which will integrate up to 2MB of cache amongst other new features.