Officially announced Tuesday--and the subject of rather rampant speculation and rumor for more than a month--AMD is taking direct aim at the clock speeds of chips produced by nemesis Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) by trying to fight against years of marketing inertia.

FORBES: Silicon Confusion

The workings of most chips are governed by a clock and the data processing they do advances with each tick of that time-keeper.

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For Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ), which has for years marched relentlessly down the performance road--constantly boosting the performance of its chips by boosting raw clock speeds and then letting the marketing department brag about it ad nauseum--it's a significant switch in strategy.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The first Centrino-branded chips are expected to show up sometime before the summer and debut at clock speeds of about 1.6 gigahertz--considerably slower than Intel's flagship Pentium chips, which now top out at about 3 GHz.

FORBES: Magazine Article

While the clock speeds don't match those of Intel's fastest chips, the Apple executive claimed his new processors beat the pants off of a 600MHz Pentium III running most applications -- an assertion that Intel will likely refute.

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