That was the quickest conference call we ever had. After a 15 minute wait, Steve Lapinski, who heads up Athlon product marketing at AMD, was there, ready and waiting, to take calls from the world press but almost as soon as we got one in, and before we could get another one in, the call went off air. Our question to Lapinski, who we bumped against in CeBIT a couple of weeks back, was about its market share in the high performance (Athlon) desktop market in the first quarter of this year, and whether it could sustain that demand. You will remember that we had reports from channel and OEM partners (in Europe) saying that it had significantly increased its share. Lapinski said that estimates from Mercury Research, a US marketing company, was that AMD held between two to five per cent of the high performance desktop marketplace in the first three months of this year. "We see no problem meeting demands for our customer requirements," he added. That will be fulfilled by both Fabs 25 and 30, he said. These figures vary greatly from Europe, where, we understand, the market share is just over eight per cent in the high performance (Athlon) segment. And AMD estimates it holds around 32 per cent of the value segment -- essentially K6-2s. In fact, sources said that Gateway in the UK will be the first to be able to sell 1GHz Athlons, although that remained unconfirmed at press time. Lapinski also confirmed that the entire production of its Athlon 1GHz processor during March will go to Gateway and Compaq during this month. AMD plans to ship 1GHz processors to all of its other OEMs and partners in April. AMD's share price rose to over $47 shortly after the opening of trading on Wall Street. ® See also AMD puts Intel on 1GHz ropes AMD Athlon stormed during Q1 -- channel