Incidentally, IIRC (and I could be wrong. It's happened before. Once or twice
) Athlon XP came around the same times as Windows XP and I think the strategy was to associate themselves (AMD) more closely with Microsoft in a bid to gain some market share. I would think I would do the same thing, since many people consider the modern PC as a "Wintel" machine, owing to the dominance of both respective companies. You don't read articles using the term "AMDin" or "WinAMD". I personally thought Athlon XP was a decent idea to try and bring AMD more market share and attempt to educate people that you don't
need an Intel processor to run Windows, as the term "Wintel" tends to imply. At least to computer neophites. Athlon FX, on the other hand (this is the first I have heard of it), does not strike me as a good name. I see no real good rationale considering, AFAIK, the GeForce FX has not been widely praised. (I could be wrong about this too, don't flame that last comment please. I don't keep up on the latest video tech, I am not interested. Heck, I just recently upgraded my GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce 4 Ti4200). And to comment on the Pentium name, it must have been original enough at the time that is has stuck for so long. I agree that the new Pentiums are essentially "sequels" to the original. Why shouldn't they be named Pentium II, III, 4 and so on. It works. People know who to associate Pentium with. That sounds like marketing genious to me. If you can essentially make up a word and have nearly everyone know what you are talking about when you mention it, it seems the marketing must work/have worked. Itanium got a different name because it is new, and different, than the Pentium. So it should be called something different. I like the Quake analogy. It's the same with movies, games, automobiles, even Coke tried it (Coke II anyone? Of course, that was crap IMO).
Just my two cents.
\Dan
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