More news from HKEPC today has it that AMD plans to ditch their PR rating system of which they've been relying on since the days of the original Athlon XPs; it was used to distinguish the performance of their processors in relation to that of Intel's actual clock speeds, given that their chips were designed to be more efficient and offer better performance clock for clock.

Apparently we will see ye'ole PR rating system phased out by the 3rd quarter of next year when AMD launch their next-gen desktop offerings (including that of the quad-core "Altair" and "Altair FX" models). The article also touches on an X2 6000+ due for launch sometime during Q1 next year.

Once P-Rating is a very successful marketing tactic for AMD, making consumers to compare the PR of AMD's processors to the clock speed of Intel's processors. Until now, most of AMD's processors still adopted the PR scheme for customer's reference. Nonetheless, the PR figures are no longer useful for comparison as dual core has become common; sometimes it is quite confusing, especially since the launch of Core architecture. Sources reported that AMD plans to discard the PR scheme starting from the next-generation Stars processor.