Remember the nineties? Remember the wars between Wintel and Apple – Apple produced the PowerPC RISC chip in 1994 (with a little help from IBM and Motorola!) and claimed that because of their different architecture, the speed of the PowerPC chip wasn’t directly comparable with the Pentium’s clock speed.

Well, now the shoe is on the other foot! Intel’s Craig Barrett is now saying that there is “More to Life than Gigahertz” and that for now Intel will be concentrating on different architectures (namely dual and multi-core processors) rather than concentrating on producing faster processors. In Barrett’s words “we’re going to do two things: build off the most power-efficient capability and go to multiple cores and leave the speed game on the side”.

This is a big shift in emphasis for intel and it will take a lot of time and money to educate IT purchasers that speed is not, in fact, what it is all about – despite what Intel have been telling you for the last 10 years!!!