It's easy to see why the Athlon is able to best Intel's Pentium III as it incorporates four times the L1 cache, twice the bus speed and a superscalar FPU versus Intel's current desktop flagship.

Because the Athlon utilizes a form of Digital's EV6 Alpha system bus architecture it cannot be utilized with any Intel-compatible Slot-1 mainboard. Instead users will need to purchase an AMD-approved Slot-A based mainboard. The Athlon mainboards do however use normal PC-100 SDRAM, which should make the transition easier for upgraders.

In addition to the existing Athlon CPUs, a 650Mhz version is due by mid-September (this will be the outright fastest non-overclocked x86 CPU available to the public).

Beyond 650MHz, we've heard strong rumors that place an early October launch for a monstrous 700MHz Athlon, which makes us wonder how high AMD can continue to push their somewhat dated .25 micron process.

Some engineers at AMD have told Sharky Extreme off the record that 750MHz by mid to late November is an amazing possibility, whether or not management will decide to produce that chip is a question of economics for the company.

AMD has been preparing a brand new chip fabrication facility in Dresden Germany for the past year. It's been designed from the ground up to produce high-speed .18 micron Athlon CPUs by early 2000 and will incorporate AMD's copper technology (replacing their current aluminum process) by early summer 2000 if all goes well.

If AMD can continue to keep supply channels full while the Dresden fab ramps up to speed, then there's no question that they can fulfill the commitments that are necessary at this level of the market.