As originally reported by our staff last month, AMD will achieve and ship an 800MHz Athlon CPU in late January, early February, and will continue to ramp up speeds until the 1GHz barrier falls in summer 2000 (second gen. 18um process).

Readers should not confuse the air-cooled 1GHz Athlon CPU in AMD's timeline with the specially overclocked Athlon 700 CPU KryoTech uses in their 1GHz Athlon PC. Unlike the new KryoTech unit, the Athlon 1GHz CPU will offer 512KB of integrated, on-die L2 cache running at full core speed, as well as copper interconnects.

There were a host of other, farther away Athlon models that were illustrated to us by AMD reps, and we'll cover these 2H/2000 parts in a stand-alone article that offers more depth.

For now readers should know that AMD's mindset at Comdex was both very positive, and very confident, which is in direct contrast to the "beaten like a dog" attitude we've seen from them over the years at past shows.

AMD will clearly continue to offer incredible products throughout 2000, Intel likely has a bigger problem on their hands than was first thought when the Athlon debuted in August.

Intel has shied away from a full on Comdex presence in recent years, and you can't really blame them for their lack of participation at the show.

Lets face it, between their own annual Intel Developer's Forum, Germany's CeBIT uber-show, and a host of other domestic and international commitments each year, Intel's yearly show expenditure budget likely exceeds the entire research and development budgets at some technology-related companies.

Still, rumors and information regarding Intel's future plans began to filter down at Comdex, with the talk centering on the upcoming 'Pentium4' (slang term, NOT the official name) Willamette processor.

What is known currently is that this next-generation IA-32 processor line is the primary focus of the company at this point, and everything possible is being done to accelerate its launch period to 1H/2000.