Microprocessor Report analysts love the AMD Athlon so much that they've named it their PC processor of the year - for the second year in a row.

Why? It appears to come down to balance, according to Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst at Micro Design Resources (the Cahners-owned outfit which publishes the top dollar newsletter). He contributed the following quote to the AMD press release announcing its win.

"The AMD Athlon processor is the best balanced performance processor today. It is competent, fast, consistent, and delivers world-class performance."

Other winners of the MPR awards for 2000 include: the Sun UltraSparc III (best workstation/server processor); and the Mobile Intel Pentium III - with Speedstep (best mobile processor). You can read the full list of winners - along with some free(!) analyst comments here. ®