Ship Date: October

After lightning quick introductions of their high-end 600 and 650MHz Athlon CPUs two months ago, AMD is again set to stun the industry today by delivering a processor that runs at 700MHz using a .25 micron manufacturing process.

Conventional wisdom said that a 700MHz clock speed couldn't be achieved before the shift to .18 micron die sizes occurred, but again AMD has managed to deliver the impossible with their steroid-injected Athlon 700 CPU.

Sharky Extreme was lucky enough to be able to work with the new Athlon CPU for the past two weeks and the results, you'll find, tend to speak for themselves.

Lets take a look now at the newest member of the "Fastest x86 Processor of 1999" club, the Athlon 700.

When we first reviewed the 600 and 650MHz Athlon CPUs, we found them to be extremely strong performers versus Intel's best processor offerings.

The Athlon's totally new integer and floating point core design provided the fastest results we've obtained in game-based benchmarking this year, particularly when we paired the then-new Athlons with 3D accelerators that were capable of providing 350 to 400 MegaPixels per second worth of fill rate.

However, we were more cautious in recommending the Athlon at that early time than other members of the media who evaluated the products and we were justified in that position after the disastrous launch of the previous Super 7 platform a year ago.

Thanks to many months of design improvements and BIOS upgrades, the Super 7 platform finally did end up achieving a degree of maturity that allows almost any user to be able to outfit their PC with one without hesitation. They've finally overcome their rocky start.