Ship Date: December

Over the past four months over 20 brand new CPUs have been released on the market from Intel and AMD.

This is a blistering pace as processor introductions go, and it certainly won't be maintained in the year 2000 as clock speeds creep upward to the 1GHz level and beyond.

While somewhat reminiscent of the 60's automotive scene in the USA, where car manufacturers continually tried to out-horsepower each other with new models introduced at a faster rate than normal, the CPU horsepower game has risen dramatically upward the past few months and is now getting close to knocking on 1GHz's front door.

In that spirit we're looking today at the latest salvo to by fired by the 'underdogs' in the CPU wars, the folks at Advanced Micro Devices or AMD. AMD has rushed to deploy the fastest Athlon series processor yet, which is clocked at a high-altitude 750MHz speed level.

At 750MHz the newest Athlon is the fastest x86-compatible processor ever released in terms of MHz, and after seeing the benchmark results we recorded you may conclude that it's the fastest x86-compatible processor available, period.

It's hard to grasp exactly how fast 750MHz really is. We happily forget that it wasn't long ago that we were looking forward to the introduction of Intel's P5-166 and 200MMX CPUs, just three short years later 1GHz chips are now looming large. AMD's Athlon series has proven to be quite the golden goose for the veteran company, taking them off the ropes and putting them on the offensive for the first time in recent memory.

The Athlon is selling so well in fact that several independent financial institutions are predicting that AMD will have a "break-even" fourth quarter for the first time in years, thanks to the high average selling price (ASP) that the margin-rich Athlons currently enjoy.