AMD’s so-called ‘True Performance Initiative’

Kelly McNeill writes: “In a determined effort to change the rules of a game in which it is falling increasingly far behind rival Intel, chip maker AMD on Tuesday released four new Athlon XP chips that, for the first time, have been assigned names intended to convey a strategic rather than a technical message. The Athlon XP chips were so named under AMD’s “True Performance Initiative,” which aims to make buyers focus on overall performance rather than speed. Ironically, the new names tell buyers of the chips’ performance relative to each other but give little hint of their true performance.”