C|Net posted this bit on the AMD Athlon (K7) which you better be excited about. It looks like AMD will indeed be moving to the 0.18micron technology late this year, here is a bit of it thanks to AMDZone. The big news? The NDA holding back so much info goes out on the 9th. of next month.

Athlon chips were only released to motherboard manufacturers late last month. In the fourth quarter of this year, AMD will begin to shift to the more advanced "0.18-micron" manufacturing process, said Anixter. Then, immediately following the shift to 0.18-microns, the company will start making its chips with copper, rather than aluminum, wires.

The "WTF!?" bit of the day goes to something I spotted over on AMDZone- MaximumPC is reporting that the AMD "K-8" is set for a December release. I don't see that happening unless the K-8 is just an Athlon aim squarely at the server market, much like the relationship between Intel's Pentium II/III and the Xeon line. And while we're on the AMD bit, AMDZone's K7 FAQ has been updated.

Think you're a l33t hax0ring c0der? Prove it to AMD and you get to win all sorts of stuff...maybe even an AMD Athlon. Thanks AMDZone.

Our crack team of software engineers is looking for the best coders out there. Show them how you used 3DNow!™ to solve an interesting problem in your program. Send us a function or routine that has been optimized and our guys will tear it apart and analyze it. We're looking for elegant solutions to difficult problems using the 3DNow! instruction set.

According to AbsolutePC the guys at AMD will be moving on to the 0.18 micron technology for their CPUs this year.

Ars Technica serving up the technology again with their excellent technical preview of the "K7". Here's part 1, and the hot off the presses part 2.

Last time we talked about the execution engine of the K7, and how it's got enough horsepower to do more work per clock cycle than any other x86 processor on the market. But as I hinted at in the end of Part I, all of those execution units do you no good, however, if you can't feed instructions to them fast enough to keep them fully occupied. That's where the front end of the CPU comes in. The front end is like a backstage area for instructions, where they get all primped up and ready to go out to the execution engine and do their thing. There's even a fussy guy with a French accent who has a space cadet haircut and really good shoes, running around saying things like "Places people! Places!" and "You know what to do!" Ok, not really, but it's close. Let me explain.

ArsTechnica has a new AMD K7 Athlon technical preview of the CPU which should give you a pretty good idea of just what is going on with that thing and why it smacks the P3 around like a little biznatch.

Some info on the AMD K7 Athlon CPU from the guys at AMDZone for ya. Firstly it looks like according to this page that you can actually already buy a K7 500mhz chip which is the low end of the 3 chips which are scheduled to come out. Then you can have a look at the updated AMD tech docs if you're feeling extra curious. Lastly here is an article talking about the AMD president who recently resigned.

update: Sean Hall of AMD contacted me to say that those guys are only taking a "limited number" of pre-orders. Oh well.

FiringSquad has a new hands-on preview of the AMD K7 Athlon CPU. Just how good is the K7 600mhz? Check this out:

No matter how good the 3D accelerator, breaking 50-60fps is nearly impossible on crusher, until the Athlon 600 that is. A crusher score of 70fps is unheard of, and a testament to the power of AMD's new 3-unit pipelined FPU.

Just so you guys dont go thinking everything is just picture perfect over at AMD, This press release just went out over the bis wire announcing that the president of AMD has resigned after the announcement of some major money losses the past quarter. AMD had made statements prior to this announcement that they would be posting a loss however, so it is not much of a surprise. The loss of their president however is a stinger. Thanks AMDZone

Word from The Register is that the AMD Dresden Fab 30 over in Germany is already up and running and producing copper based CPUs. There is no word on what kind of yield the fab is getting though, but this means that if they are getting a decent rate, we could be seeing a 1GHz AMD K7 CPU by the end of the year. A big smooch to ArsTechnica for the link.. (Err, link fixed... oops)

Something a lot of people may  not be aware of is that the first shipment of AMD K7 Athlon processors will not be capable of SMP (Dual processor). CPUReview takes a look at the possibilities in the future with SMP and a K7 though. You can also have a look at this "What is a 7th generation processor" article that AMDZone sent along.

The AMD K7 Athlon press just doesnt stop does it? GlideUnderground chats with a AMD rep asking a number of good technical questions on what the K7 is all about. As I mentioned yesterday the benchmarks that came out as well as John Carmacks' praise of the CPU are some serious considerations.

The 200Mhz bus should be considered the bus between the CPU and the system logic (northbridge). The buses off of the chipset (AGP, memory, PCI, etc) are capable of running at speeds distinct from the 200Mhz connection between the CPU and system logic. We haven't talked about the details of the specific implementations or how these will affect overall system performance. Without going into too much detail on performance levels, I can say that the AMD Athlon processor is the industry's first seventh generation CPU and that we plan to demonstrate this level of performance through industry accepted benchmarks

The CNN Tech page has a good look at the AMD K7 CPU which I keep getting more and more antsy to get a hold of. Looking at these benchmarks from those French dudes, and then John Carmack saying how cool it is and we still cant get one! Supposedly they are shipping though according to AMD and we may be able to get them by the begninning of next month. Thanks AMDZone

PCParadox has an interview with Richard Baker of AMD talking about the new K7 Athlon CPU that we should be able to get a hold of within a month. Also make sure and check out the Athlon benchmarks that came out a couple days ago.

Does the release of the PIII Coppermine worry you at all, regarding the speed increases that Intel will get with its move to on-die cache and Copper technology?
No. Athlon has 128k of on-die cache and as you will see from the performance metrics which we have already published on our web site, we expect to outperform coppermine when it finally comes out in November. Also coppermine will debut at 600 Mhz, we have 600 Mhz now. Again, coppermine does not use copper interconnect.

Couple of articles for you guys to check out that are both pretty interesting. The GameSpot UK guys line up several AMD and Intel CPUs and square them off against each other. There arent any K7's in there just yet though. Also you can check out the PCParadox History of Graphics article.