Sales of AMD's 1GHz Athlon processor have now started in Japan's high tech area Akihabara, Japanese reader Battlax reports. At the same time, a number of other technologies have started to appear on the streets round Akihabara, which are famous for showing hi-tech the rest of the world has to wait for. You can find the Athlon page, in Japanese, here. The chips are selling for around ¥178,000. A translation of this page, using Lernout & Hauspie software, suggests that the prices are perhaps higher than they ought to be, and although the K7s are available in small quantities, they are available. The same text suggests that there is a scarcity of power supplies to make the 1GHz Athlon run. According to Battlax, the Japanese PC Markets survey site, which may be found here, is also reporting sales of flip chip Celeron IIs at 566MHz, as well as a number of new motherboard platforms for the Athlon which use the Via KX133 chipset. Those include the KA7, the AK72, the M7MKE and the Trinity K7 mobos. The pages are also showing an Athlon overclocking tool called Jumpstart. You can find the KX133 page here. Perhaps more significantly, the site is also showing the debut of motherboards based on Micron's DDR Samurai 64M2 chipset. You can find that page here. According to our translation software, the MTSAM 64GZ mobo costs ¥75,000, in limited quantities. The mobo supports dual Slot One chips, eight DIMMs, and has Lan and SCSI 2 interfaces. At the Intel Developer Forum, Micron was demoing this chipset but reported at the time that the product was unlikely to be anything more than a technology demonstration. ® Conversion rate: ($1=¥105)