On Monday 6 March, semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc announced it had started shipping the world's first one gigahertz microprocessor for personal computers. Two days later its giant rival, Intel Corp, said it had started shipping its own 1GHz PC microprocessor.

In New Delhi, Intel's director South Asia Avtar Saini claimed that Intel's Pentium III processor operating at 1GHz is the highest performance microprocessor for PCs, enabling Intel's customers to ship the fastest personal computers in the world. Two days earlier AMD had made a similar claim.

The new chips are 500 times faster than the first megahertz chip developed 25 years ago, which clocked 2MHz, or 2 million cycles per second. Industry observers likened the event to aerospace companies developing aircraft that broke the sound barrier in the middle of the last century.

The difference will probably between twiddledum and twiddledee. With a clock speed of 1GHz, these chips can process 1 billion bits of information in a second. Whoever comes out on top, and Intel usually has done that because of its huge size, the world has moved one more step into a faster future. It will, of course, have to pay for the speed.

Intel's 1GHz Pentium III is priced at $990 in 1,000-unit quantities. On the other hand, AMD's 1GHz Athlon processor is priced at $1,299 in quantities of 1,000. These prices are likely to drop since these chips are now available in limited quantities. You can bet there will be a price war. Also see AMD slashes Athlon prices for an earlier report on 700MHz chips.

Do you really need such speed? Well, Intel says it is targeting "PC enthusiasts" who buy high performance PCs for surfing the Internet and running advanced applications like digital photography, video editing, music, voice recognition, and three dimensional video games.

Compaq has already announced the launch of new computers powered by 1GHz AMD Athlon chips. Now Dell says it will launch a special edition Dell Dimension desktop computer with Intel's 1GHz processor.