Introduction

Not long ago the impossible happened. Intel, the largest processor-maker in the world, was pushed from its throne of the provider of the fastest x86-CPU. Small and struggling AMD had provided a product that's not only just about faster than Intel's flagship, but leaving Intel's Pentium III-series, including Xeon, in the dust rather badly. As if this wouldn't be bad enough, AMD had beaten Intel where it really hurt, in Intel's old domain, the floating-point area. While this new AMD Athlon-CPU was ahead of Pentium III in the integer-arena quite considerably, it left all Intel-processors far behind at 'number-crunching', the area that used to be pronounced so overly important by Intel's marketing in the past. It was a nasty slap in the face of the self-confident Intel-management and everyone in this company dealt with it in a different way. Many OEMs and system integrators will remember Intel road shows, where Chipzilla's marketing guys tried to make fun of Athlon or decided that the Earth was flat, water flows uphill and Athlon was an inferior product to the wonderful Intel-processors. Others - God bless them - just kept quiet as you should do when you're defeated, but the majority faced this 'ridiculous' condition with the well-known 'Intel-arrogance' and tried to just ignore the existence of Athlon.