AMD has changed the name of the K7 to the Athlon (are the Biathlon and Pentathlon next?). The word amongst the industry is that as powerful and as great a performer as the Athlon might well be, it's not going to be readily available to the 'general' public until FAB 30 (Saxony Manufacturing GmbH in Dresden Halbleiterwerk) can get it together. A lot depends upon AMD being able to produce the more cost-effective .18micron Athlons as opposed to the higher costing .25Micron Athlons. Until then (rumors point towards November through to January of next year) don't expect to be able to buy an Athlon too easily. Not unless Compaq (probably) is your cup of tea. AMD should technically have two really great parts in the 550MHz and 600MHz Athlons (we've already seen countless benchmarks showing this) but they have a hard time turning a profit on them with a .25micron process. With only four partners having signed up to the Athlon program thus far, motherboards are going to be scarce. There's a reason for them not spending vasts amounts of their resources and capital upon designing Slot-A (now we know what the 'A' is for) based motherboards. Many motherboard manufacturers we spoke to said that their reasoning behind not going any further than 'evaluating the Athlon' was that they were worried they would be left with a bunch of Slot-A based motherboards this Xmas that can't be sold due to the lack of supply in terms of the Athlon. We really do hope that Athlon succeeds, the industry needs a kick like the Athlon could provide, the question is (as ever with AMD) supply/delivery. Can they do it?

In a recent meeting with Intel about how best to go about benchmarking the performance boost of SSE instructions on the Pentium III, the conversation was initially centered around Games. More realistic lighting, more detailed environments, higher polygon counts, multi-resolution meshes, improved AI and Special Effects...this is all very cool stuff, indeed, but we got the feeling that Intel was preaching to the choir. We felt we should know more about the effects of P3 and SSE on non-game applications. Like Interactive Barney.