Intoxicated With Speed: AMD Athlon V. Intel P4

The table below gives details on product launches from AMD and Intel over a period of two and a half years. For comparison purposes, we concentrated on the Athlon and the Pentium 4 because these are the image-bearers for each company.

The neck-and-neck race between AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium 4 began more than two years ago, with Athlon becoming the first manufacturer to break the 1 GHz barrier . The details in the table listing the time between launches is also interesting, as it makes clear that AMD took its time at the beginning to successively raise the clock speed on the Athlon.

All the same, the time between the launch of the Athlon 1333 and the 1200 MHz variant was 155 days. Intel took an even longer respite when it took 190 days between the launch of the P4 with 1.5 GHz and the 1.7 GHz variant. Competition has stiffened, particularly in the last 12 months. That's clear from the shorter times between individual product launches.

Nevertheless, after the P4/2533 was introduced at the beginning of May, Intel let another 112 days pass before launching its current top model, the P4/2800 . The reason for this is not hard to find: arch-rival AMD had a tough time raising the clock speed in order to give Intel some stiff competition in terms of performance.

Pentium 4 with 3600 MHz: the FSB clock will remain at 133 MHz, the multiplier is 27.