'Performance Matters More Than MHz'
This heading is directly taken from the front page of an AMD presentation that I received right after I had been the first to report about
In times as hard as this, after experiencing a constant business downturn all year and then a terrible terrorist attack that killed thousands of innocent people and that made the economy even weaker, AMD's future revolves around "Performance Matters More Than MHz" and the question if customers are going to understand and accept it.
This article will be a bit different than the usual stuff you know about processor releases. The real beef of AMD's AthlonXP-launch lies not in processor architecture, benchmark numbers and overclocking climaxes. It's all about AMD trying, or rather struggling, to change people's perception of computer performance, which - rightly or not - has been based on the good old 'megahertz' for decades. Trying to change old habits is a very difficult task and AMD is fully aware of that. That's why AMD is starting with a somewhat halfhearted attempt of replacing 'megahertz' with, well, something that looks like 'megahertz' as well. We'll get to that a bit later.