Tom's Hardware has an article explaining AMD's new plan in its battle against the megahertz myth. It seems that the new Athlons (based on the Palomino core) will be specified by model rather than MHz. Model A1600, for instance, is a 1.4GHz Athlon, which AMD views it as equivalent in speed to a P4 1.6GHz, at least. They demand that no motherboard/BIOS maker ever reveal the actual clockspeed of the chip, and even go as far as to forbid the printing of the CPU's clockspeed in the motherboard's reference manual. Interesting concept. Reminds me of Cyrix's naming scheme back in the day. I think having AMD around is definitely a good thing, but this tactic seems somewhat untoward.
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