After all the hubbub about the K6-3, we anxiously awaited the real reason we had appeared as expected at the AMD booth on Wednesday: The big daddy, the big enchilada, the chillin like a villain AMD K7.

Sporting more sexy features than Jenna Jameson, the K7 pulls out all the stops to lay the lumber to Intel's upcoming Katmai line of CPUs. The K7's publicly disclosed features include a 200MHz Digital created EV6 compatible system bus, 128KB of L1 cache, up to 8MB of L2 cache, a core that offers a nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture and a pipelined floating point unit.

All of these things point to a strong player, and the 500MHz K7 we saw running on an AMD developed mainboard chipset appeared to deliver the goods big time. The test unit we saw running Winstone98 was slightly handicapped by a lack of 200MHz SDRAM, but other than that lone problem the CPU appeared to be far along in its product development cycle.

No benchmark results are allowed to be reported on about the K7 unit we saw, but as far as the actual ship times and prices, we offer the following:

Thanks to loose lips and SE being in the right place at the right time, we were able to overhear the "real" deal behind expected ship dates, prices, and other relevant information concerning the K7. This information is very controversial, and we're sure that other sites and AMD themselves will refute it, but the reality is that we wouldn't report it if we didn't believe it was at least 80% certain. Hell even Anand believed it, and he's got AMD stamped on his forehead….