The microprocessor race continues. According to The Inquirer, AMD, who now loses about two lengths to Intel, will announce a couple of new CPUs on the 1st of October, winning those two lengths back. The Sunnyvale based microprocessor maker decided to speed up the announcement of the Athlon XP 2700+ CPU and issue the appropriate press release one week before the original schedule. The company also decided to push the 2800+ model, based on the Thoroughbred core, in order to mach Intel with their 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor.

Although Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+ chips are not widely spread on the market, AMD definitely needs to be able to show that they really can compete with the largest semiconductor company in the world and offer top of the line chips with same or even better performance. Given that Pentium 4 processors, especially lower-end models continue to drop in price, AMD is likely to further decline the pricing of their current Athlon XP CPUs.

As I have pointed out above, Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+ are still not available in some regions. We told you a number of weeks back that those processors were noted for sale by an Estonian retailer (whose sales person confirmed this), however, we still have not seen such devices for sale in Russia and even Japan. Keeping in mind this quite unpleasant fact, I have to doubt that AMD will be able to start selling their new Athlon XP 2700+ and 2800+ processors in the first half of October.

Both novelties are intended for 333MHz EV-6 system bus, as you may have already guessed, and mainboard vendors are likely to start releasing new BIOS versions for their KT400 based products to support the newcomers. Who is going to be the first? :-)