Unless you've been living in a state of unflinching denial for the past year (and hey, who could blame you?), you know the score in the Megahertz Wars: Motorola (and therefore, Apple), 500 MHz; Intel, 1.5 GHz. At first glance, in clock speed, if not necessarily in actual real world performance, Motorola is getting its clock cleaned. Did we say cleaned? We meant disinfected, microbially scrubbed, decontaminated, and ready for the clean room. Getting trumped threefold at pretty much anything qualifies as "one serious butt-whompin'."

Note that we did say "at first glance," mind you, because most of you are aware that, depending on one's point of view, Intel's not really at 1.5 GHz. Early tests revealed such disappointing performance of Intel's new 1.4 and 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 processor, some stores such as Best Buy have reportedly yanked all P4 systems from their shelves due to "performance and heat issues." And then there's the little matter of that 1.13 GHz Pentium III-- recalled three months ago, with nary a reissue in sight. So fret not, kids! Intel's only beating Motorola by about a factor of two, not three! (This is the part where everyone sarcastically says "woo hoo" while languidly twirling a finger in the air.)

But wait! While watching TV might convince you otherwise, Intel's not the only game in town. Let's not forget about AMD, those spunky upstarts whose Athlon chip has Intel execs standing by with the cyanide tablets. A couple of weeks ago, AMD shipped the 1.2 GHz Athlon-- and since we haven't heard word of a recall yet, evidently this wasn't a "just ship it so we can brag"-type move. Worse still (for Motorola and Intel), The Register reports that AMD has its new "Palomino" Athlon chip running at 1.5 GHz in the lab-- and unlike Intel's beasts, the Palomino is apparently running at that peppy rate without a fan or any other kind of super high-tech strap-on cooling system. It's just using "a simple passive heatsink."

Hmmm... an x86-compatible chip running at 1.5 GHz without a fan? Bad news for Motorola and Intel, maybe, but we bet Apple's engineers are pretty intrigued right about now. We wouldn't be stunned to hear that the mad scientists in Apple's labs are already assembling fanless Athlon-powered Cubes running a skunkworks x86 version of Mac OS X. In a market like this, it's always nice to hedge one's bets...