A quarter century ago today, AMD launched its AMD Athlon XP processor family. These were highly performant processors based on the firm’s latest Palomino core, but ran at lower raw clock speeds than Intel rivals. Facing a marketing imbalance between perceived and actual performance, AMD mounted a serious campaign to explode the 'megahertz myth' with this generation of CPUs. Thus, it introduced new Athlon XP processors with a Performance Rating (PR) designation, alongside a slogan insisting “Performance matters more than MHz.”

Intel, with its Pentium 4 processors, was clearly winning the MHz race at the time, while a CPU’s clock speed had long been established by marketers as a key performance metric. Unfortunately for AMD, its CPUs of the era didn’t hit such high clocks, even though the application and gaming performance was just as good (if not better) than Intel's.

Our tests from October 2001 noted that AMD wisely undersold its chips, using the newly devised PR naming system. Anything less and it would have faced strong opposition and derision. Our tests clearly showed that a new “AthlonXP 1800+ is able to beat Intel's flagship Pentium 4 2 GHz in the majority of benchmarks,” wrote the original Tom, Thomas Pabst, in a 13-page feature about AMD’s newest CPUs. Moreover, it was observed that “AthlonXP at 1533 MHz is able to reach or even beat Pentium 4 running at an almost 33% higher clock speed.” Pabst concluded that AMD’s clocks/performance situation forced this concerted stand against the MHz myth.

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