Updated The rumours that Gateway will introduce a machine that uses the AMD Athlon processor may well be true, but if so the European sales force doesn't seem to know about the machine due to be launched very soon indeed. A phone call to Gateway's call centre in Dublin this morning seemed to suggest that the company has no plans to intro such a machine. After checking with his supervisor, the salesman we talked to said that as far as he was aware, Gateway had no plans to introduce such a machine. He said: "It's not as fast as people are making out. There's no real [performance] difference between the Pentium III and the Athlon." He added that Gateway could do such a machine but instead is majoring on the Pentium III/700 range as the top end machine. It could be, however, that the US wing of Gateway might start selling Athlons, according to AMD Zone, leaving us poor Europeans in the (temporary?) lurch. A more likely explanation is that supplied to us by an insider at Gateway in the US. He said: "The representative you spoke to in Dublin, as we do, has no information about any Athlon plans. And because of how Gateway operates in the U.K. he wouldn't know. We were notified about the Astro only weeks before its introduction by the company. Gateway doesn't have a stellar record of communicating with employees." We asked whether Gateway had an Intel Pentium III/733 available either and he said no. So we'll have to wait and see, won't we? ®