Today AMD Corporation introduced their new Athlon processor, a superchip runing at 1 gigahertz speed available soon in Compaq and Gateway computers. The Athlon processor can process 1 billion bits of information per second. This gives them a momentary bragging advantage over the Intel Corporation, and in the company's press release claims that this permanently secure's AMD's place in the record books.

The company is selling the chip in batches of 1000 for $ 1300. Please note that you can buy a complete computer system many many places for less than that, not just a chip. The AMD press release is computer buzzword heaven for those who enjoy it. Quote:

The AMD Athlon processor is an x86-compatible, seventh-generation design featuring a superpipelined, nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture optimized for high clock frequency; the industry's first fully pipelined, superscalar floating point unit for x86 platforms; high-performance cache technology, including 128KB of on-chip level (L1) cache and a programmable, high-performance backside L2 cache interface.

So now we can expect intel to one-up these guys soon.

What's more interesting to me about this announcement is to see the new alliances forming around the PC industry, which will of course effect the PC lifecycle. Here we see Compaq and Gateway jumping bed with Amd, still another alliance against Microsoft.

Most people are concerned with the accelerated planned obsolesence we've always had in the pc industry. My daughter called me recently and said she was thinking of leasing a portable rather than buying one, because they change so often. I told her that leasing is usually an expensive way to go, and to buy a good portable in the middle to high midrange and hope to get a good 3 years' use and hopefully 5 years' total use out of it.

Whatever you buy is technologically obsolete. If you bought a system with the fastest Intel processor yesterday, you are technologically obsoleted already by the new Athlon processor. You cannot win the technology race; you will never have the latest and the greatest. Ah but you might as well try and catch the wind.

You just don't want to run into functional obsolescence; that when your computer really just isn't usable anymore for tasks. Kind of like trying to use an old IBM Pc with a 300 baud modem on the internet today; it's just not going to work, and it's cheaper to buy new than to upgrade.

The realities you have to face are that hardware and software are always going to change, but you can't change with them. You have to make a stand, and expect a whole new generation of things to come around every 3 years or even less.

Examples are Windows 95, then Windows 98, now Windows 2000. Microsoft office 95, 97, and now 2000. The computer industry has its own agenda, and you have to have yours. A lot of new software checks the hardware in your computer and won't install if you don't have enough horsepower.

A lot of the press release material related to the Athlon processor mentions home consumers, games, and future entertainment market plans. When we see AOL/Time Warner talking about merging, we know there's big changes coming down the line. The home computer is destined to be used for a lot of entertainment purposes; internet surfing, video, movies, television, and new modes of conferencing and entertainment.

I'm not sure exactly what the Ahlon will do eventually, but I know it will shorten the cycle of pc life expectancy.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

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