Apple breaks psychological barrier

Apple has unveiled its first 1GHz multi-processor Mac.

The computer maker said the dual 1GHz processors have a combined performance of 15 billion floating point operations per second, or 15 gigaflops.

The revamped range of PowerMac computers also includes models with single-processor 933MHz and 800MHz configurations.

The top two models also ship with 2MB of DDRAM Level 3 cache and nVidia's latest GeForce 4 MX graphics card with 64MB of RAM. Hard drives range from 40GB to 80GB.

Apple conceded the cycle rate race a long time ago and claims that clock-speed alone is no judge of a chip's processing power.

Nonetheless the company will be relieved to have finally passed the 1GHz milestone.

Intel rival AMD has also abandoned the race and taken the controversial decision to stop promoting the cycle rate of its processors.

Its latest offering is the Athlon XP 2000+. The company said the number indicates that it offers equivalent performance to a 2GHz Pentium processor, despite the fact it actually clocks a lot slower.

Intel meanwhile released 2.2GHz Pentium 4s.