We think we may have found the solution to Motorola's (and therefore, Apple's) clock speed troubles: just do what Intel did. Announce a higher speed well in advance of shipping, ship the faster chip whether or not you've actually got it working, recall it when it doesn't work, and then don't ship the "fixed" version for at least seven months after the recall. It's a great way to get the news out about a product you don't expect to have working for nine months anyway.

For those of you who haven't a clue about what we're saying, we're talking about the 1.13 GHz Pentium III chip. Intel shipped it this past summer, but recalled it at the end of August due to an "erratum." And as faithful viewer Matt Wolanski points out, an InfoWorld article now reports that Intel doesn't plan to relaunch the chip until "the second quarter of next year." Meanwhile, the hype about Intel having broached the 1.13 GHz barrier is still floating around in the collective public consciousness, despite the fact that the company still can't actually ship a working chip at that speed. Clever, right?

Motorola, on the other hand, took a tentative step towards that strategy last year when it discovered a G4 erratum that prevented its chips from running reliably at speeds above 500 MHz, but the company just didn't go far enough. Rather than wuss around with this 500 MHz stuff for a year, what Motorola should have done was crank out a slew of those 700 MHz V'Ger chips it claimed to have running in the lab nearly a year before, ship them amid a huge advertising blitz, and when they burst into flames in the field, just recall them and say they'd be back on the market "soon." Bingo-- an instant boost in the Megahertz War, and a far less impatient unruly mob waiting for real progress.

So here's our advice: Motorola should just bite the bullet and ship that 1 GHz Apollo G4 it discussed at the recent Microprocessor Forum, recall it when it fails, and revel in its sudden newfound ranking in the clock speed standings well in advance of an actual technological improvement. And here's hoping that they do it soon, because the natives are getting restless-- especially with Intel's 1.4 GHz Pentium 4 slated to ship by the end of the year. That means the fixed version might ship by next Labor Day, so Motorola had better get on the stick!