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 (http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/)). He contributed the following quote to the AMD press release (http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/21006.html) 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 (http://www.chipanalyst.com/awards2000/awardsummary.html). ®