AMD has started production of a 1GHz Athlon
processor this week, with a 1.4Ghz version being made in the middle of
Y2K. How has AMD suddenly
jumped from being 100-50MHz slower than the fastest Intel processors,
to being faster than Intel? Maybe
it’s the new .18u technology. Maybe
it’s the design of the processor, or maybe its luck. It doesn’t really matter to me, but what does matter, is the
fact that the Athlon processors, being faster than the Pentium iii,
can overclock as well, or even better, as the Pentium iii. I remember a day when the newest AMD processor could hardly
keep up with the speed it was rated at, let alone trying to overclock
it.

There has been news of the Athlon 500 making it to 650MHz. And what I like about the processor is that the multiplier lock
is on the PCB, which can be manipulated. And, if you haven’t seen the PCB of an Athlon Processor, It
has a slot type of connector on the top, right next to where you
manipulate the PCB to change the clock multiplier. What could this be used for? Certainly not something like SMP, being that’s built into the
motherboard. Personally,
I believe it’s for attaching it to a module that will let you
manipulate the clock multiplier without the need for soldering tools.

All I can say about the heavy competition of the two CPU
makers is: only the consumers can benefit. Prices have nowhere to go but down. When Intel released the Pentium iii 600Mhz/100MHzFSB CPU, it
was the first flagship processor from Intel to start at a price under
$700.

What is in a name? A
Merced by any other name would perform just as sweet.
Intel, once again, changes the name of a processor to
something that rhymes with Titanium. This time, they changed the name of the processor code named
Merced to Itanium. Why the change in
name. Well, if it rhymes
with titanium, it must be a strong performer, since titanium is a
strong metal, right? Well,
that’s not necessarily true, but that’s what Intel would like you
to think. The Itanium
processor will boasts advancements in computing technology just as the
Pentium did in its time. But,
personally, I wouldn’t count AMD out. They have a processor, code named the Sledgehammer. (Think
about why they would name it that.) It boasts 8^th Generation architecture just as the
Itanium does, but there is a twist. While you need a truly 64 bit operating system, which M$ will
be producing, for the Itanium, you can run any PC operating system you
want on the Sledgehammer, from MS DOS 6.2 all the way up to Windows
2000. Please think about
all the advantages of that so I don’t have to waste a few pages
explaining them to you.
Speaking of speed…
Although I would really like to bash a certain movie in
this portion, I promised myself I would not. If you haven’t noticed, the prices of SDRAM have risen very

speed fully in the past few months. Some say it’s because manufacturers were making next
generation DRAM such a RAMBUS, DDR SDRAM, and VC-SDRAM. That, in turn, would bring the amount of SDRAM modules on the
market down, which would drive prices up. Other’s say that the manufacturers would just sick of getting
hardly any profit, so simply raised the prices of their chips. But, the majority of people blame Mother Nature. I believe it was a combination of all three. In all reality, do you seriously think the price of ram was
going to stay at around 90 cents per MB?