What's to think about? Sure, Intel spends yea bucks on pounding their "Intel Inside" slogan into our brains, but why do they bother? Do any of us besides the technowonks even need to know what chip is driving the bus? Actually, we do, and not just because "we oughta know, so there." Chips are like the engine that drives your car, and the more you know about the damned things, the more educated of a buying/using decision you can make. And quite possibly, you can save yourself a few hundred smackers in the process. Just remember, there's a lot more to a chip than megahertz. Which chip is "faster" is only one of many factors involved in a buying decision.

A few terms of note that you might want to know, if you don't already:

• Gigahertz: a data processing speed of 1 billion items per second; 1 gigahertz (GHz) equals 1000 megahertz (MHz)
• Megahertz: a data processing speed of 1 million items per second
• DRAM: Dynamic Random Access Memory, the standard type of memory used in PCs
• SDRAM: Synchronous DRAM, a new type of DRAM that can run at much higher clock speeds than conventional memory; comes in 100- and 133MHz varieties
• Double Data Rate SDRAM: Doubles the speed of normal SDRAM; competes with RDRAM
• Rambus DRAM (RDRAM): type of memory used in the Pentium 4; fast and expensive

Chips can be roughly divided into three subgroups, high-end, midrange, and low-end, or budget, chips. You can also divide chips into "Intel" and "not-Intel" groups, but that can make you crazy. Let's try the high-medium-low grouping instead.

The High End. Only two chips sit atop the heap as of this writing: the Intel Pentium IV (including the Xeon for servers) and the AMD K-7 Athlon. These chips are the milieu for the high-tech wonk, the maximum gamer, the workstation user of CAD, Web hosting servers, or 3-D content creation, and the computer professional who designs high-powered digital content or digital images. This is a surprisingly small segment of the market, but tell that to Intel, who is busy informing us that we all need top-of-the-line Pentium IVs and we need them now. No, we don't. Unless you fit into the above category, you'd be better off spending your money on a slightly less macho chip and use the savings for more RAM, a snazzier video card, a bigger monitor, or whatever trips your trigger. Caveat: later on down the line, the beefier capabilities of the PIV or the Athlon may become more of a necessity and less of a luxury as applications written to take advantage of these chips' capabilities hit the market. There's another reason to consider one of these superchips: multitasking. If you like to run 5 or 6 heavy-duty apps at once, you might be happier letting the PIV or Athlon run your show. PCWorld recommends that Athlon buyers look for a machine equipped with 266MHz DDR SDRAM memory, the latest version. They also recommend that PIV buyers look for machines with PC800 RDRAM, not PC600. Note: AMD has released the "Thoroughbred" Athlon XP, a designation unrelated to the Windows XP system, as their flagship cutting-edge chip. It roars out of the gate at up to 1.8GHz as I write this, with faster speeds coming down the pike (2GHz by the time you read this), but AMD is labeling them according to a proprietory scheme that they say more accurately reflects the chips' performance and takes some of the emphasis off of strict megahertz measurements. Early results showed the Athlon XP outperforming "faster" Intel 2+GHz chips, but more recent tests had the two chips performing fairly evenly.

Intel released its Pentium IV "Willamette" chip at an initial speed of 1.3GHz and currently topping out at a blistering 2.4GHz plus. Whew! The PIV is a huge chip, and the first totally new design from Intel since 1995's Pentium Pro. Due to its size and complexity, it's destined to be a high-priced, hard-to-find item for the near future. The bad news for Intel is that the speediest Athlon chips (currently hitting 2.1GHZ itself) consistently outperformed the new Intel offerings, once again proving the axiom that clock speed doesn't necessarily equate with real-world performance. That may change as applications are rewritten to support the new chip design, but as of now, unless you're hugely into streaming media or the cutting edge of gaming technology (the two areas that the PIV outperformed the Athlon), there's no reason to run down to the PC store and grab the new chip. The good news is that, if you're into overclocking, the PIV appears to be a prime candidate, with reports of standard PIVs being revved up well over their clock speeds. Better yet, the PIV is the first chip to take full advantage of RDRAM "Rambus" memory technology. Rambus technology allows the computer's memory system to keep up with the fastest of the new microprocessors, controllers, and graphics cards. Want to know more? Visit www.rambus.com/. (Overclocking is the process of adjusting the CPU and bus in order to make the processor run faster than its designated speed. If you don't know how to do it already, this isn't for you. Leave overclocking to those who understand it -- and I'm not one of them!) Note on "hyperthreading:" you may read a lot of hype on the benefits of this new technology, but benchmark testing shows that for current apps, hyperthreading shows little gain and sometimes actually slows processes down. Future applications coded with hyperthreading in mind may show more significant benefits.

Marketing: Intel still dominates this area of the market, but AMD in particular has set its sights on challenging Intel's dominance. Intel moved to shore up its sagging flanks with the 1999 rush release of the Pentium III and its aforementioned Christmas 2000 release of the PIV. Hmmm, how did Intel just happen to have two such big bunnies to yank out of a hat? With the PIII, it was simple, they just gave the next generation of the Pentium II a new number, making it sound like the PIII is a "next generation" of chip. Not really. The PIII had been scheduled for release for months under the less hyped moniker of the Pentium II "Katmai," originally a 450MHz to 650MHz PII chip equipped with a new set of instructions called "SIMD architecture" along with other refinements; suffice it to say that, like MMX before it, SIMD beefs up graphics capabilities, but won't revolutionize the world any time soon. But you gotta admit, the name "Pentium III" sounds more next-generationish. AMD has challenged the PIII and Xeon with their K7 "Athlon," which clocks in at over 2GHz, and equalled or even surpassed Intel in both speed and price. Intel's "Coppermine" upgrade to the PIII cruises at speeds up to 1GHz (and promised a new 1.13GHz to be on the market by September 2000, but a recall forced them to postpone this one; the PIII upgrades were shelved when the PIVs became market-ready). It sports a 256KB secondary cache, which does a lot more to speed up performance than 50 or 100 more MHz. Problems with the PIII made a big hit in the media. There's the notorious PIII security issue revolving around the ID number on the chip, which Intel claims is for online-commerce security reasons and others claim acts as a "super-cookie" that snitches data about your PC to savvy Webmasters, allowing them to target your machine for spam. The chips ship with a utility to turn off the ID, and Intel claims that all PIII chips ship with it turned off anyway -- you have to turn it on before it blares info about your PC all over the Web. Thankfully, the PIV chips don't have any reported security flaws this blatant.

The Middle. This area is really crowded, with Intel's aging Pentium IIIs, creaky-but-still-servicable Pentium IIs, and their big-bang-for-the-bucks Celerons. AMD boasts a kickass Duron chip along with older K6-III "Sharptooth" and even older K6 chips. Cyrix/Via is still hanging on to a tiny market share, with their older M II and new M III "Samuel" jockeying for survival. The PII is still enough chip for most general users, and the push for the PIV is helping the prices of the PIIIs to drop (no one markets PIIs except on the used shelves any more). Rounding out the field is Intel's Celeron II chip, which hit the markets in late 1998 after the inauspicious debut of its older and wimpier sibling, the Celeron. The Celeron story is interesting: Celeron was Intel's response to the first wave of slower, cheaper processors challenging their grip on the market (indeed, the sub-$1000 PC market was largely made possible by the cheaper chips, and Intel still doesn't have a large share of that pie). The lower end of the midrange market was ruled by AMD's K6 family and Cyrix's M II (formerly 6x86) offerings. Intel decided to recoup some territory with its release of the much less pricier Celeron chip. The problem with Celeron I ("Covington") was that, to cut costs, Intel left the onboard (L1) cache off, slowing the chip down to the point that the others significantly outperformed it. The critics howled and the chip didn't sell well. (There are a few Celeron I-equipped PCs at 266 and 300MHz still out there on the remaindered shelves. Avoid!) To recoup, Intel rammed 128K of cache right onto the die and as a result produced a hell of a chip -- fast and cheap. That was the Celeron II "Mendocino," and it stands up well to the AMD and Via/Cyrix chips -- although it is still a little pricier. To Intel or not to Intel? That's a big question you have to answer. Certainly the older offerings from AMD and Via/Cyrix more than make up for their slightly -- very slightly -- inferior performances compared to the Intel chips with their lower prices, but Intel's Celeron chips are price busters in every way and should be given serious thought. And the new Durons, currently available at speeds up to 1.3GHz, seem to be thrashing the Celerons in trial runs, mainly because of different cache configuration -- unfortunately, the Durons never caught on in America, and are primarily available in Europe and Asia; the chip will be discontinued at the end of 2003. But for the vast majority of computer users, any of the above chips should see you in good stead well into the millennium. All but the most intensive of home users, mobile users, corporate users, and small office users can do perfectly well with a midrange chip. Here, price is a major consideration. Graphics fans and gameheads, the older AMD K6-2 and Cyrix chips probably won't suit you, as their graphics capabilities are strictly mediocre. If your choice comes down to Duron vs. Celeron, as it probably will, your best bet is probably to snag a Duron if you can find one. Unfortunately, between AMD's status as second banana to Intel and the Duron's limited availability in the United States, you might have a hard time finding a PC with a Duron chip inside. It consistently outperforms the Celeron, but is much more easily found in Eastern Europe and Asia than in America. Note: the latest Celerons are still a bit crippled compared to their big Pentium siblings, mostly because even though the speed has gone up to 2GHz, the onboard cache remains an anemic 128K.

The Low End. Checking this end of the field out is like shoving your head into a tank of piranha and trying to sort out the winners from the bloody bits. Intel, AMD, and Via Technologies' Cyrix and Centaur chips have all leapt into the ring, turning this the marketing equivalent of a pro wrestling free-for-all (the latest entrant is from Transmeta, the low-power TM3120 "Crusoe" line specifically designed for notebooks and Web appliances, and now being used with devices under development by AOL and Gateway). These low-end chips have made the "under a grand" PC possible, and in fact have seen the "under a grand" sink to "under $500" PC. The weak sister in this field is the Celeron I "Covington," the cacheless chip (discussed above) that now only lurks on old discount and remaindered shelves. Forget that one, and turn your attention to the low-end offerings from AMD, particularly the Duron, and Cyrix, two of the survivors of the budget-chip feeding frenzy (Rise has pulled a disappearing act, and Via Technologies has bought up both Cyrix and IDT/Centaur in an effort to reclaim some market share for them). With the discounts and sales going on everywhere, unless you're on a strict, strict budget, you very well might be able to afford a midrange chip for only a little more. As far as use, these "low-end" chips can do a perfectly good job for many users, particularly home and corporate users who primarily Web surf, run the usual desktop office apps such as word processors, databases, or spreadsheets, and play games that don't push the PC envelope too far. If you want to get heavily into the digital domain of audio and video playback, though, these chips probably don't have enough oomph to keep you happy for long, especially the Durons and Via/Cyrix offerings. Speaking of Via/Cyrix, the company has taken some new and unsettling turns. Cyrix chips have steadily lost ground to AMD and Intel offerings, and as a result, Via is cutting its losses by swallowing the Cyrix line whole. As of now, Via/Cyrix offers the following chips: the Via/Cyrix III "Joshua," a 500-600MHz chip designed for mid- to low-range PCs and no longer supported by the company; the older MII, a 300-433MHz chip targeted for low-range PCs; and the Via/Cyrix III "Samuel 2," a successor to the "Joshua" that will come in at 700-900MHz, boasts a very small chip size and low power consumption (because of its WinChip origins; it actually was a Via/Centaur design, but Via decided to market it under the more recognizable Cyrix moniker), and is designed to compete with the Celeron and Duron. Via/Cyrix stresses that the new chip is designed for business use much more than gaming, but poor FPU performance limit its applicability in running office apps (note: Via seems to have yanked the Samuel chip entirely). The company was until recently hawking a new M3 "Jalapeno" chip, designed to compete with the Pentium III and Athlon, but Via yanked that one out of production. On the bright side, Via has a new chip, designated "Ezra," in the works that is planned to put Via over 1GHz and possibly compete with its Intel and AMD rivals. New note: IBM and Dell originally planned to market machines powered by the Crusoe chip, but have now pulled out of the deal. Crusoe's future is in doubt, especially as competition from Intel and AMD for the same market niche along with poor initial performance assessments have caused the market to back away. Transmeta may be refocusing its efforts for the mobile/wireless market. And for even more fun, Via and Intel are busily suing each other over patent infringement involving the Pentium IV. Yee-hah.

Mobile Chips. Intel used to take this area of the market for granted, and as a result its somewhat slower Pentium and Celeron chips lost market share to competition from AMD's mobile Duron and its older, less popular mobile versions of the aging K6-2s. The new kids on the block, Transmeta and Via, are cranking out tonlots of cheap, powerful chips for notebooks, laptops, and palmtops. A mobile version of AMD's 64-bit Clawhammer has recently hit the market as well, comparing favorably with Intel's most powerful mobile offerings. Intel isn't promising mobile Pentium IVs until sometime in 2002. AMD is entering the high end of the mobile market with its Palomino chip. Intel's had its Mobile Intel Pentium III Processor-M chip around for a good while; based on the PIII Tualatin core, the PIII-M has a 133-MHz front-side bus (FSB) and 512K of Level 2 (L2) cache. Not the speediest chip, but it is designed to save battery power, a major concern for road warriors. Currently the most popular mobile chip for notebooks, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor-M, is built on the same Northwood core as the P4 desktop chip and has a 400-MHz FSB and 512K of L2 cache. It, too, is configured for longer battery life. To keep heat and power consumption down, Intel restricted the P4-M's clock speed to 2.6 GHz. The chip typically uses about 35 watts. That's more than the PIII-M uses, though the battery life is still decent. Intel, however, is replacing the P4-M with other processors. Some notebook vendors have put the full-size P4 chips into their machines; Intel is combating that tendency by releasing the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 (Mobile P4 for short; no M). The Mobile P4 has the same Northwood core but is still relatively easy on battery life. It uses a 533-MHz FSB (up from 400 MHz on the P4-M), as well as 333-MHz DDR SDRAM (up from the P4-M's 266 MHz). Still a hog at a typical 70 watts, the Mobile P4 bridges the gap between the desktop Pentium 4 and the Mobile Pentium 4-M. And there's the Intel Pentium M, the processor component of the new Intel Centrino mobile platform. (To use the Centrino name, a system must also include one of two new Intel chipsets and Intel's integrated wireless solution.) The Pentium M was built to maximize both performance and battery life. The Pentium M currently maxes out at 1.7 GHz, while the P4-M can reach 2.6 GHz. The Pentium M's performance, however, is similar to a much faster P4-M. Confused yet? Transmeta should have released their Crusoe TM8000, a speedy and cheap mobile chip, by now.

Around the Corner. It took 20 years for chip design to make it to 500MHz speeds, but only 8 months to go from 500MHz to 1000MHz, or 1 gigahertz (GHz). 2GHz+ chips from both Intel and AMD are here, and Intel plans on a 3GHz offering by early 2003. Intel held off on releasing a 1GHz chip until it was ready to unveil its Pentium 4, but AMD's 1GHz Athlon forced them to release a PIII version. In mid-2001, we finally saw Intel's 64-bit Merced (renamed Itanium) chip, also designated IA-64, a non-x86 chip designed to run new versions of Win 2000 (Win 2000/64), Unix, and NetWare, and make such goodies as full-motion video, voice processing, and photo-realistic imaging a reality, while improving efficiency of operation and remaining backwards-compatible with the older architecture. (Intel delayed the release of Merced/Itanium untill mid-2001 because of unanticipated problems and the sheer complexity of the chip. Right now it appears only for chips to be used in servers and workstations; it only appears on a very few desktops. Want to know more about 64-bit architecture and the new Itanium2 chips? Check out www.intel.com/itanium/ and microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/platform/strategic/64bit.asp as well as my own Itanium page.) AMD has two versions of its 64-bit competitor for the Itanium chip, Clawhammer and Opteron; the Clawhammer chip is for personal PCs, while the Opteron is designed for workstations and servers. Both are 32- and 64-bit compatible, and Clawhammer will support AGP 8x graphics cards. Clawhammer replaced the Athlon chip in early 2003. (A 64-bit dual-core Opteron, with two processors on one chip, is in the works. Zoom!) The last (I think) Athlon chip of the series, "Barton," appeared in early 2003; it's an Athlon XP chip with a 512KB cache. IBM has evened the playing field by providing all three of Intel's competitors with chip fabrication facilities, making it much easier for them to finally make enough chips to meet demand. All four manufacturers plan to push the envelope with hunky new releases in the next few months (that should be all out now that I've begun to update this page): Intel's follow-ups to the server-based Xeon chips, code-named "Foster," their follow-ups to the PIII "Tanner" chip, "Cascades" the Pentium IV "Willamette" and their upgraded and ever-speedier Celerons; Via/Cyrix's "Samuel 2," which clocks in at anywhere from 600 to 733MHz; Via/Centaur's sped-up WinChip2 with 3DNow! and the newer WinChips 3 and 4; and several new AMD chip families: AMD's PIII/Coppermine competitor called "Thunderbird;" and the brawny Celeron competitor, "Duron" (now discontinued, but still available). (AMD rammed tons of cache memory directly onto the Thunderbird chips, which made them true speed demons, even though their measured speeds are still between 700MHz and 1GHz.) The biggest gorilla of them all is the 64-bit "Merced" or "Itanium" chip, which will once again signal a new wave of PC'dom (and is being followed by the just-released Itanium 2, or McKinley and to be succeeded by the Madison, the high-end successor to the Itanium 2, and the value-marketed Deerfield...who can keep up?). Keep an eye on Texas Instruments's Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips, which drive numerous electronics communications devices today and are poised to co-opt much of Intel's market in the near future. And, remember the Alpha? IBM and DEC/Compaq were supposed to release a 1GHz Alpha chip well before either Intel or AMD, but still haven't done so. Right now, IBM kept saying that a 1.2GHz Alpha chip will be on the market by late 2001; we have yet to see it. Why does anyone care about the Alpha? Well, besides the fact that there is a large and vocal niche of users who won't use any other chip, the Alpha architecture broke new ground in chip design in general. Elements of Alpha design are evident in both AMD and Intel designs, as well as the PowerPC chip for Macintosh computers. Watch for Intel to release the Prescott, an enormously fast chip which may be marketed as the Pentium V, in late 2003, and promises a 6+GHz (the Nehalem?) by late 2004.

From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, or what's with all the different chips named for Northwestern rivers? And who released what when? Let's take a short jaunt in the Wayback Machine and straighten this out. (For the record, the river names are assigned to "cores," not chips. If this means nothing to you, don't worry about it.) In 1971, Intel released the first chip designed for use in a personal computer, the 4004. It was a primitive 4-bit contraption that could do little besides add and subtract. (Prior to the 4004, engineers built computers either from collections of chips or from discrete components, i.e. transistors wired one at a time. It was followed closely by the 4008, an 8-bit upgrade. In '74, the 8080 chip was released, which became the basis of CP/M, the first operating system of its kind and granddaddy to both Mac and Windows OS's. The 8086 debuted in '78, but was too much chip for the existing hardware, so in '79 Intel brought out its damped-down cousin, the famous 8088 chip. The 8088 became the basis for IBM's PC/XT, which, along with the Apple IIe, is the first personal computer most Americans were aware of. In 1982 the 16-bit 80286 came out, forming the basis for IBM's PC/AT and starting the line of x86 chips that continues today. In 1985 Intel released the 80386, the first 32-bit microprocessor (and first appearing in Compaq PC's, not IBMs). AMD and Cyrix, rival chipmakers, both released 386 clones later on to very little fanfare. Intel still had a deathgrip on the market. Intel later released a lightweight version of the 386, the 386SX, and renamed the original full-strength chip the 386DX. This is when the chip market began to lose its former linearity, when the 386 chip became available in different flavors by different vendors. The 386 was the first chip to truly support Microsoft's Windows OS. 1989 saw the release of the 486, the first chip to feature a cache (significantly speeding up chip performance) and the first chip that really made Win3.x take off. The 486SX was essentially the same as the 486DX, with its math coprocessor disabled. Things got confusing for a while, when Intel released two later flavors of the 486, the 80487SX (virtually identical to the 486DX) and the OverDrive upgrade to the 486SX. Then Intel released speedier versions of the 486, the 486DX-250 and the 486DX-2-266, which really muddied the waters. Still following all this? In 1994 the 80486DX4 came blazing out of the gates, along with clones from AMD and Cyrix which again got little notice but ran cooler and almost as fast as their Intel competitors. Both AMD and Cyrix continued to market upgrades for their 486 clones, but Intel was already neck-deep in its next venture, the Pentium. The Pentium was originally slated to be called the 80586 (hence the "Pent" prefix in the name), but Intel wanted to copyright the name, and couldn't copyright a string of numbers. The first Pentium chip actually appeared in early 1993, the Pentium 60 and Pentium 66 (the numbers referred to clock speeds). AMD and Cyrix claimed that their souped-up 486 chips compared favorably to the Pentiums, but their claims gained them little notice. What did break Intel's grip on the chip market was the infamous "Pentium bug" that plagued early releases of the chip and made some customers think a second time about Intel-only products. AMD's K5 and Cyrix's 6x86 chips were touted as "bugfree," and began to claim a slender share of the market. Intel squashed the bug in the later Pentium releases, and released a plethora of speedier and speedier versions, many of which still power PCs in operation today. Cyrix in particular did well with its competition to the Pentium, beating AMD to the punch and racking up much higher sales than the K5, although both chips were quite sound. AMD managed to gain much ground with its K6 chip, which today forms the centerpiece of its chip offerings. Again, as with the 486, the branches and varieties of Pentium chips, and its competitors, are legion. The Pentium Pro chip (1996) ran faster than any other chip then available, but heat dispersal problems and trouble handling certain older instructions limited its popularity. In '97 Intel released the Pentium MMX, a top-of-the-line chip with additional multimedia capabilities. (Note: MMX appeared on Pentium IIs, AMD's K-6 family, and the WinChip.) That same year they also released the Pentium II "Klamath," which featured a large cache that sped up performance tremendously, even though its clock speed was a good bit slower than the older Pentium Pro. The Pentium II "Deschutes" (PIIs with a more sophisticated core and hence a new name) chips now run as fast as 450MHz, but are available in a plenitude of speeds and configurations. AMD released its K6 to compete with the P/Pro and PIIs, and Cyrix released their 6x86MX (now called the M II) shortly thereafter. AMD's K6, available in speeds from 266 to 333MHz, is also available with high-tech 3DNow! capabilities (as are chips from Via/Cyrix) and have 380- and 400MHz versions available now. 2000 saw the Pentium III "Katmai" and its more powerful brother, the "Coppermine," take most of the headlines and certainly plenty of TV ad time. The PIII was strongly challenged by the release of the AMD K7 "Athlon." Intel recently released (in late 2001) the Pentium IV "Willamette." The race continues, with AMD and Intel pushing each other to go faster and faster; currently both are sporting 1GHz+ versions of their top-drawer chips as headliners. In late 2002 Intel releaced the Mobile PIV. 2003 saw the desktop PIV hit 3GHz, as did the Xeon. AMD's Athlon XP chip topped out at 2.25GHz that same year, but the more interesting release from AMD was the Barton chip, a member of the Athlon family that featured twice the cache of the regular Athlon. That is pretty much the current state of the art as far as chips go. Both companies, along with Via/Cyrix, have made efforts to claim the lower end of the PC market as well. AMD and Via/Cyrix deliberately keep their high-end chips priced markedly lower than Intel's. Via/Centaur's WinChip and WinChip2 have cut deep inroads in the sub-$1000 PC market, as have AMD's and Via/Cyrix's chips. (IBM offers the WinChip under the name IBM 6x86MX for its own machines.) AMD has made the first move in splitting a chunk of the notebook market away from Intel by putting K6 chips inside notebooks from Compaq, CTX, and WinBook; look for notebooks with the K6-2 and Duron chips on shelves everywhere. The former new kid on the block, Rise, tried to compete with Centaur and Cyrix with their MP6 chip, but never identified any vendors using their chip and eventually all but disappeared from the market, though their products still appear at electronics shows.

For comparison purposes, you might want to know that the Pentiums-IIIs can execute any piece of code that ran on the original 8088, but the Pentium-III runs about 3,000 times faster. Whoosh. And the PIVs and high-end Athlons are even faster. Double whoosh.

So what's the point of all this? Those of you who buy used PC's might get some useful information out of the history lesson. Those looking at new PC's have to decide whether to buy Intel or not-Intel; whether to buy a lower-end chip like the Winchip, Via/Cyrix (if you can find one), to buy an older, slower chip from Intel or AMD, or to spend the bucks for a faster, more powerful PIV or Athlon chip. Then you have to decide whether to buy now or wait for even newer chips to hit the market. It's your call. The temptation to be the fastest gamer or code warrior on the block is strong for some of us, but whether or not using a PC with the latest blazingly fast chip will actually boost your productivity or your enjoyment of the latest version of Diablo is debatable. You have a sweeping range of choices now. Gee, do I keep my old Pentium, do I charge out to buy a PIV or older PIII, do I buy into the competition, or do I wait for one of the new releases? Or do I hoard my pennies and wait for Itanium? And why exactly does Intel name its chips for obscure Northwestern rivers? Keep up with chip news at www.tomshardware.com, www.chipanalyst.com/, www.geek.com/, and www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/5693/ (this last site is woefully out of date). A number of sites offer news about breaking technology; keep an eye out for stories on price cuts of microprocessors. Those price cuts often mean newer chips are about to hit the market -- which means deep discounts on older, but perfectly servicable, chipsets. The PC press is full of stories about stolen and/or counterfeit chips appearing in rebuilt or no-name machines, or machines offered in swap meets or at auction. If the PC price is too good to be true, it probably is. You can run your PC's serial number through the database at the Stolen Computer Registry at www.nacomex.com/, but there doesn't exist a similar database for components such as processors. Useful geeky tidbit: most chips now are offered with either Level 1 or Level 2 cache memory; L1 memory is a small amount of superfast RAM directly on the chip, while L2 memory is a larger, but slower, RAM cache. L2 memory used to be between 256KB and 512KB, but lately 512KB has become the standard; also, L2 memory used to reside between the L1 cache and the computer's main memory, but lately the L2 cache is being placed on the chip as well. We like L2 cache and want as much of it on the chip as we can get.

Summing up: you don't need the fastest, most muscular chip on the market unless you're one of a select few, and then you already know it and don't need me to tell you (is that Zen enough for you?). Most likely you can do fine with a mid- or low-end chip; you have to assess your PC work and play habits, check your wallet, and judge accordingly. Certainly, with the recent price drops, the chip shouldn't be the biggest factor in your buying decision.

Addendum: A lot of Intel buyers want to make sure that the processor that's in their brand new machine is the one they were told was inside. By surfing to support.intel.com/support/processors/
tools/frequencyid/download.htm with your machine, you can download a free utility that will give you plenty of CPUID info, including processor classification, system configuration, processor features, and cache size. Also, Intel has finally, and grudgingly, admitted that some Pentium III motherboards have flaws in the Memory Translation Hub. Go to www.intel.com/support/mth/ and click on "Check on System" to find out whether or not your machine is affected.

As mentioned above, an excellent source of chip information is Tom's Hardware Guide, at www.tomshardware.com/. You'll probably drown in more info about processors, chipsets, etc. than you ever wanted, ut if you hunt around, you can find the chip info you want.