You all know the drill by now: Apple innovates, the rest of the industry scoffs, time passes, and the rest of the industry plays follow-the-leader while counting on the public to have forgotten who came up with the innovation in the first place. It's long been true regarding hardware and software development, but this time around, the pattern applies to a slightly different aspect of the business: marketing to correct gross technical misconceptions at the core of how the unwashed masses shop for computers. Yes, folks, soon Apple won't be the only company trying to fight the Megahertz Myth.

As we mentioned yesterday, Intel (the very company whose marketing force has fed the whole "Megahertz = Speed" fallacy for so many years) may soon find itself backpedalling like mad, since its new Itanium processor currently tops out at 800 MHz-- a full gigahertz below its own lesser Pentium 4. And make room on the bandwagon, because here comes rival x86 chipmaker AMD. Once neck-and-neck with Intel in the Great Clock Speed Race, AMD has since slipped solidly into second place; according to a CNET article forwarded to us by faithful viewer Stephanie, the company's new Athlon processor due next month will "only" run at 1.5 GHz, while the Pentium 4 is poised to hit the 2 GHz mark.

So what's AMD to do? After all, it competes far more directly with Intel than Apple does, and since "the vast majority of PC buyers just look at the numbers and go with the bigger one," a 500 MHz deficit is sure to hurt. Well, CNET surmises that in addition to advertising aggressively to help dispel the Megahertz Myth, "AMD could also take a page from Apple Computer." We're not entirely sure what they mean by that, unless they expect the company to borrow Apple's Jon Rubinstein to repeat his seven-minute wild and wacky nonstop thrill-ride of a presentation during the keynote at the next AMDworld Expo. (We bet he doesn't come cheap, either.) In any case, it's clear that AMD is going to have to do something, and soon.

So things may well start to get very interesting over the course of the coming year. If Intel and AMD both unleash their marketing machines to divert emphasis away from clock speed and toward some real measure of, say, actual performance (and the universe doesn't collapse in on itself from the sheer untowardness of it all), Apple stands to reap the benefits without needing to lift a finger. Can you imagine a world in which shoppers choose their computers not by clock speed, but by how quickly said computers can actually perform useful tasks? Neither can we, but at least Apple may soon have some reluctant help in making such a utopia a reality.