At the end of he 1990s Toyota introduced the first of its Prius hybrids, but to be very little acclaim. The car was small, expensive, and underpowered- which made it easy for the public and most competitors to ignore. (An exception was Honda, which was also developing a hybrid engine) Only a few thousand environmentalists took note when the Prius was first introduced in the U.S in 2000.

But Toyota was not discouraged. By 2003 it had defined the Prius into an attractive, roomy, and fully-powered car. The combustion engine powers the car in demanding situations, such as going uphill. Going downhill or breaking the kinetic energy produced is stored in the electric battery, which takes over when the car is moving in city traffic or idling. That enables the car to get 60 or so miles to a gallon of gas. For the driver, operating a Prius is the same as for any car; he keeps his foot on the accelerator, and a computer under the hood smoothly toggles back and forth between battery and engine.

The AMD machine was the second-fastest we’ve ever tested, with a 116 mark on world Bench 5, easily surpassing the 95 posted by the 3.2-GHz dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 reference system that we looked at earlier.

The unit showed it prowess on the multitasking portion of worldbench 5. Its time of 6 minutes, 44 seconds was an impressive 3 minutes, 42 seconds faster than the average o two Athlon 64FX-55 systems, and about 3 minutes faster than the dual-core Pentium EE 840 reference PC’s time.

If you want one of these powerful beasts, you’ll have to pay dearly for it: AMD’s 4800+ chips alone are priced at $ 1001 each in quantities of 1000, while Intel’s 3.2-GHz Pentium EE 840 chips currently sell for $995. Entry-level Athlon X2 chips will cost only about half that much, however, so you can still get the benefits of 64-bit technology nd dual-core processing without breaking the bank.

Intel devotees should also observed dual-core Pentium D- based systems arriving about the time you read this, and such PCs should be considerably less expensive than those with the Pentium EE 840.