AMD earlier this year beat Intel to the market by a few days with the first chip to run at one gigahertz, and plans to begin shipping a 1.1 gigahertz chip on Aug. 28.
Processors are the ''brains'' of personal computers.
One measure of their performance is the ''clock speed,'' measured in hertz, or cycles per second. Intel's new Pentium runs at 1.13 gigahertz, or 1.13 billion cycles per second. Intel and other chipmakers, who typically get much of their profits from such high-end chips, have accelerated the introduction of faster chips because of breakthrough manufacturing technologies. Much of the existing software on the market today requires far less processing power than the fastest chips provide, although the new chips demonstrably speed up games and graphics. Because of production problems, Intel has made few of the gigahertz chips it introduced earlier this year.