The media usually eats this stuff up, but when you get credible sources like John Carmack (.plan update) saying that K7 Athlon rocks, you know there is some substance there. Looks like it's Tim Sweeney's turn with the praise as he has just updated the Unreal Tech Page with how this new wonderchip run Unreal (but no groovy benchmark charts):

My new 550 MHz AMD Athlon (K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768, running on a Voodoo3 3000 card.  Even more telling, at no point did the frame rate ever drop below 38.0 fps.  That's astounding, considering the intense lightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level.  Even while playing Unreal Tournament's most texture and polygon intensive level (Shane Caudle's DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps.

The Athlon's 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games like Unreal.   Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the Pentium III's 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon.  This CPU truly shows a generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 to my first Pentium.

When I saw AMD's K7 spec, I was pretty skeptical.  The K6 had been hyped up, but in reality it was slower for Unreal than a Pentium II of comparable clock rate, due to its poor non-SIMD floating point performance.  The K7 claimed to fix all of that, and debut a new architecture with 3 execution pipelines.  I decided to wait and see, without getting my hopes up.

Bottom line: I waited, and now I have seen!  The Athlon is clearly the fastest x86 CPU at any clock speed.

Congratulations go to AMD.

And just to think that the P3 Coppermine (which contrary to popular belief, does NOT make use of copper technology) will have 64k of L1 -- still half of what the K7 Athlon will ship with (and hopefully they do get around to shipping those out)