Being close to several strong sources within the CPU industry offers Sharky Extreme accurate and reliable information most of the time concerning release dates. We say "most of the time" because all of our sources both within AMD themselves as well as their larger distributors swear that the AMD K7 500 won't see the retail light of day until mid-July at best. They then go on to say that AMD won't be prepared to supply the K7 500 CPU to anything beyond the low volume high-end server market (Intel(r) P2-Xeon and P3-Xeon) until the die shrink to .18mu occurs (October).

Frankly we hope that AMD can deliver the K7 500 by the time June 99 rolls around, as they really could catch Intel(r) napping. Unfortunately, our latest Intel(r) roadmap for 1999 indicates that Intel(r) is actually decelerating the pace of their CPU's speed gains at the high end purposely. This means that Intel(r) feels that they aren't being pushed by AMD's CPUs at the high end currently, or will be pushed the rest of the year.

We'll make the Intel(r) 1999 roadmap available soon, but we'll let the cat out of the bag early and tell you here that the fastest desktop Intel(r) CPU you'll be able to buy in December 99 will be a P3 clocked at 667MHz (5.0 x 133MHz).

To us 667MHz is disappointing, as previous Intel(r) roadmaps had shown that two P3 CPUs would be offered in December, both of which were over 800MHz in speed. Clearly either Intel(r) isn't able to hit that previously aggressive roadmap technology-wise, or they don't feel they need to hit that roadmap due to a lack of competition from AMD at the high end. You be the judge.