Nothing creates hype like being able to introduce AMD as "the manufacturers of the fastest desktop CPUs ever made" and that's exactly how many members of both the television media and the print/online media now introduce AMD.

Today's 750MHz Athlon is the first step down a long road for AMD, in that it's their first CPU core that has been produced using the company's new .18 micron manufacturing process.

As the first .18 micron product to arrive from one of AMD's fabrication plants, specifically the Austin Texas Superfab (the Dresden Germany made chips arrive next year), the new chips deliver on the promise AMD made over a year ago that stated that they'd offer .18 micron parts before 1999's end.

The fact that they followed Intel's own .18 micron part introductions so quickly is surprising, clearly the days when Intel can rely on their production system's technology lead keeping a large gap between themselves and AMD is over. (It does bear mentioning though that Intel debuted multiple .18 micron CPUs simultaneously from four of their fab plants in much higher volumes than AMD's lone Athlon 750.)

So the first .18 micron Athlon has arrived, and consumers are wondering by now what architectural improvements have been made to the base Athlon core design.

Integrated on-die L2 cache? Copper transistor interconnects? A 266MHz bus speed?

No. No. And No.

You've got to crawl before you can walk, and AMD likely feels no need to introduce stronger Athlon architectures, even if they're capable of doing just that, when they're already leading the race in terms of sheer speed and MHz.

AMD's new German fab in Dresden will supply the enhancements to the Athlon core design in time, for now the basic aluminum interconnects, off-die L2 cache, and 200MHz bus speed will have to suffice.