Semiconductor giant Intel this week found itself in the unaccustomed position of being the second company to announce that it had developed a personal computer processor that achieved an industry milestone with a clock speed of one gigahertz, processing one billion bits of information a second. Smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices beat it to the one gigahertz mark, the computer industry's equivalent of breaking the sound barrier, by two days. In an effort to recover lost ground, Intel is shipping its chip at a marked discount to that of its rival.

Dominic Coyle can be contacted at dcoyle@irish- times.ie