The thoughts of Chairman Jerry Sanders

'The introduction of its performance rating figures meant AMD's ASPs increased by 50 per cent. "Intel broke its promise by not giving more performance when they went to Pentium 4, with 20 per cent less performance. P4 in this regard is a flawed product and in order to keep die size from being too large they had to remove some performance," he speculated.

'He said that AMD's XP 2000 was slightly better than Intel's 2.2GHz Pentium 4 and vowed that the firm would double performance every 18 months. To maintain that level, AMD would have to deliver a 30-50 per cent increase with the 64-bit chip.

'"There will be a steady increase in performance and by end of this year we'll have a model 3400 by the end of this year which will outperform a 3.4GHz Pentium 4," he claimed.' - Source: The INQUIRER, yesterday.

'We don't think that anybody other than Intel and IBM have the process technology to head up high performance clock speed devices. We do believe that VIA will have an opportunity with its offering in certain low-range applications, particularly in Asia. But the realities are that so far it has offered what I call 'P-rating' devices, as opposed to true clock speeds. With P-rating, you measure performance by whichever benchmark you choose against the Pentium running at that top speed. So P-rating a 500 means that on some benchmark, you're saying your device is as good as a Pentium is with 500MHz.

'Yeah, it's real confusing, so we abandoned that strategy. I hope you know that Athlon outperforms Pentium III on every benchmark, clock for clock. So a 600MHz Athlon outperforms a 600MHz Pentium III. But we don't give it a P-rating of say 650 or 700.' - source ZD Net UK, 1st March 2000. µ