Introduction
It might sound funny to a lot of you when we are writing 'poor Intel is hurting'. I do agree that Intel is having its hardest time since IBM made the incomprehensible decision to equip their 'PC' with Intel's badly engineered 8088 processor instead of Motorola's far superior 68k solution many many years ago. The 'older' ones of you might still remember that IBM's PC was the one and only reason why two IT companies with rather mediocre products finally became more important than good old IBM itself. If you wonder why we all have to put up with Intel's as well as Microsoft's unpleasant business practices then please go ahead and blame IBM. I guess that IBM's decision makers from that time have often wished there was a time machine, which could straighten out all their mistakes from the past.
Intel's Revenge
Now while Microsoft had and still has a lot of fun with the FTC, Intel has been facing a very tough enemy in AMD, since the formerly Austin based company introduced its processor last year. The very worst thing in terms of prestige damage happened back in Spring 2000, when AMD was the first x86-processor maker to introduce a = 1000 MHz clock speed. Big Chipzilla countered with the release of the Pentium III at 1 GHz two days later, but this CPU was so unavailable that not even the press was equipped with any samples. Today, some four months later, the Giga-Pentium III is still hardly available anywhere and now Intel considered it a particularly smart move to go ahead and introduce another Pentium III version that hardly anyone will be able to get, the Pentium III at 1.133 GHz.
