Recent news of a slump in the PC market have not put off the two major processor competitors from releasing their new products. Only last week Intel announced reduced revenue expectations for the quarter and PC sales in the US for April dropped by 22.5 percent. This week however, kicked off more positively with AMD announcing its new 0.13 micron Athlon XP 2200+ running at 1.8 GHz and Intel introducing its latest budget offering, the Celeron 1.8 GHz.
Both chips come at a time when both companies are presenting their cases for claiming the Fastest Processor Title. Analysts claim that even though the new range of Celerons is based on Pentium 4 architecture, a straight Athlon Celeron performance comparison is not correct. The fact that Athlons perform more work per cycle, makes them more easily compared to Pentium 4's running at higher clock speeds. According to Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, consumers are actually better off looking at the model number, AMD's PR that is, which in this case suggests that the new Athlon is best compared against a Pentium 4 2.2 GHz.
Even if AMD's PR classification is accepted as a reasonable way of comparing chips, Intel is still some way ahead of its rival since Pentium 4's running at 2.4MHz and 2.53MHz are already available.
AMD's latest offering is expected to sell for under US$241.
