Athlons are more efficient than Pentiums. Yes, a Pentium can technically get 1.7 billion clock cycles pers second. And yes, the Athlon can only get 1.4 bil. But the Athlon can perform more instructions in a single clock cycle than the Pentium can. Therefore, it takes the Athlon fewer clock cycles to process the same amount of instructions. As such, a 1.4 athlon can match, if not overpower, a P4 @ 1.7 anyday.
The only reason many people did not see Athlons as a viable gaming platform at first (which is a definition that has unfortunately stuck with it even though the problem has been fixed) is it initially had some compatibility problems with nVidia's GeForce cards, and one of the major Athlon mobo chipsets had some problems with the AGP architecture.
Morph: that's a nifty background, if only it weren't 800x600.
---Skorpion
