The megahertz battle is over, but the performance war is as fervent as ever. Intel´s Pentium 4, with its deep 20-stage pipeline and impending move to a 130nm manufacturing process, has clenched the ability to beat AMD´s Athlon to every speed grade in the foreseeable future. That´s right, the ferocious race between Intel and AMD to the gigahertz mark will not manifest itself again any time soon. However, the ability to scale the Pentium 4 to before-unseen clock speeds carries with it an inherent disadvantage. Mainly, the average number of instructions successfully executed per clock cycle (referred to as IPC) has decreased. Therein lies AMD´s window of opportunity. While their Athlon is not as scalable in terms of frequency, its IPC is greater.