It's been a long time since Sharky Extreme has had the opportunity to review the newest flagship in AMD's CPU fleet.

Back in late December of 1998, we were one of the first publications to publish hands-on testing reports on AMD's then unreleased K6-3 400 CPU, coming by way of a top AMD reseller's recently received pre-release engineering sample.

Due to our aggressive journalism practices in obtaining that part as well as our public posting of AMD's confidential CPU roadmap timeline a short time later, the relationship between AMD and Sharky Extreme wasn't at its peak in terms of information flow for the next few months.

But as the summertime launch of the Athlon CPU line approached, AMD decided to take a different course of action with the growing web based publication community, and welcomed our queries regarding the Athlon CPU with open arms and true friendliness….

…As long as we signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the company that has bound us to specific dates for the release of information.

We felt that this was the least we could do to help stabilize the dealings between Sharky Extreme and AMD. A closer relationship ultimately benefits our readers and increases the quality of the articles by allowing us access and support from the folks that make the product.

We obliged AMD's request and soon after took delivery of two production-quality Athlon CPUs, a 600MHz and a 650MHz, along with a baseline system capable of running the parts at full speed.

This was about a month ago, in late June.

Since that time we've been poking, prodding, and generally using the Athlon 600 and 650 CPUs each day for long periods of time. The impression they've left us with runs deep.

Before we delve into the editorial opinions regarding the Athlon's level of performance, lets detail the components of the chip that has been code named K7 for the past two years.