Back in February, we met Pierre Mirjolet, architecture marketing manager at Intel EMEA, who talked about Intel's .18 micron process and showed slides demonstrating a 1GHz chip by the end of this year. Intel has not, so far, demonstrated such a beast apart from as a technology demo, but Mirjolet suggested that 1GHz Pentiums would be sampling by February next year. That now seems inconceivable. As we exclusively reported last month, Intel will demo an IA-32 1GHz part at a conference next February, but that's a long away away from providing samples. It just goes to show that things do not always pan out the way Intel expects. In other respects, Mirjolet's statements were spot-on, however. He said that Coppermine .18 micron parts would first start to appear in June this year, and by the end of the year there would be 600MHz Pentium III Coppermines. And Intel's plans to migrate its fabs from .25 micron to .18 micron technology have also motored quicker than expected, probably because of the spur that AMD applied with its Athlon. According to reports on bulletin boards, Intel engineers are attempting to reverse engineer the Athlon and are well aware that AMD can produce such a beast by now. See also Intel to demo 1GHz chip by year end Intel's plans for 1GHz processors (slide presentation) Intel to demo 1GHz IA-32 in February