This year has been an exciting year for Intel and AMD. Both companies waged war on the MHz battlefield and in the recent months, launched GHz attacks. There were more than 12 processors released this year and that's never happened before. The rate of change is fast and follows a definite 18 months cycle. But has Intel changed with the cycle or has it fallen behind?

Looking back a few years when Intel first introduced its Pentium Pro processor we can see that it wasn't largely successful with mainstream users. Intel designed it to be a workhorse and thus it landed into the workstation and server markets. Some people tried running existing 16-bit operating system and applications with the Pentium Pro but discovered that a fast Pentium MMX could do as well or better. This was because the Pentium Pro was optimized for 32-bit instructions. True 32-bit software ran like a charm on the Pentium Pro at the time though.