Summary
In terms of computing power Athlon's future looks very good. The performance numbers scale beautifully from 500 to 800 MHz core clock and I have no doubt that this will even continue beyond 1 GHz. It is also very impressive as well as surprising to see that current .25µ-Athlons can already run at 750 MHz. This leaves a lot of room for AMD to finalize their .18µ- Athlon-development, which will lead to clock speeds of 1 GHz and beyond.
Now we should hope that finally more motherboard makers will supply Athlon-boards soon, so that those powerful but lonely AMD-chips can finally find a new home in computer systems. It is ridiculous enough to see how much the battleground has moved these days. Not long ago CPU-makers fought with performance-numbers, now they fight in the motherboard-market and in the offices of software developers. Athlon certainly deserves a reasonably sized motherboard market and fairly programmed software. Whoever disagrees with that shoots himself in the foot, because the last that anyone should want is Intel losing competitors. It's the only thing that Intel should never lose.
