I will always wonder if AMD ever made any engineering samples of Athlon core CPUs for Socket 7? The 321 pin socket was likely a limiting factor, and seeing how far they were able to push the 462 pin Socket A, it was no doubt a good move on their part to go that route. But Intel were able to push Socket 370 to 1.4 GHz, and when I look at boards such as Epox' MVP3G-M with its temp sensors and such, it sure seems that they set the table for a dinner guest that never showed up.

The athlon ddr bus and increased burst lengths are a large part of the performance

What’s stranger is How the relatively minor bus differences between the p54c and the Ppro made a sizable performance difference