AMD's Success With Athlon
Lot's of things have changed since October 1998, and we had to learn that AMD was indeed able to design and produce a processor that gives Intel-products a really hard run for their money. 'Athlon', as 'K7' is called today, was released in August last year and since this time Intel's market shares have slowly, but surely shrunk, while AMD was suddenly becoming stronger and stronger.
Today, and especially since AMD's launch of the 'Thunderbird' processor two weeks ago , AMD is able to supply processors that are just as fast as, or even faster than their Intel counterparts, at significantly lower prices.
One Socket For High End And Low Cost
However, so far AMD has used its successful Athlon-core only to compete with Intel's Pentium III line of processors. Intel's Celeron line was targeted by AMD's K6-2 and K6-3, but those two processor types require the rather old Socket7-standard and are not particularly cheap to produce either. Intel's Socket370 can host Pentium III as well as Celeron, which makes platform production for OEMs as well as future upgrades for end users a whole lot easier.
