https://www.pcgamer.com/an-old-amd-athlon-k7-easter-egg-has-a-revolver-and-map-of-texas-etched-onto-the-chip-they-dont-make-em-like-that-anymore-eh/ Skip to main content (*) ( ) Open menu Close menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES [ ] Search Search PC Gamer [ ] Subscribe US Edition flag of US flag of UK UK flag of US US flag of Canada Canada flag of Australia Australia PC Gamer Magazine Subscription PC Gamer Magazine Subscription Why subscribe? * Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag * Try a single issue or save on a subscription * Issues delivered straight to your door or device From$32.49 View * * News * Reviews * Hardware * Best Of * Magazine * Forums * More + PC Gaming Show + Podcasts + Coupons + Newsletter SignUp + Community Guidelines + Affiliate Links + Meet the team + About PC Gamer Popular * Suicide Squad * RTX 4080 Super * Keyboard shortcuts * Total War: Warhammer When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here's how it works. 1. News An old AMD Athlon K7 Easter egg has a revolver and map of Texas etched onto the chip. They don't make em like that anymore, eh? By Jeremy Laird published 7 February 2024 AMD's Intel-beating Athlon chip was a real gun slinger. * * * * * * * * Comments Image of AMD Athlon K7 Pluto taken by Fritzchens Fritz (Image credit: Fritzchens Fritz) When AMD's Athlon K7 CPU was launched way back in 1999, it turned out to be something of an Intel-killer, smashing the heavyweight's Pentium III CPU. Now it turns out those K7 chips were actual gun slingers, at least insofar as they had bullet-blasting guns etched right into their silicon dies. That's the discovery made by X poster Fritzchens Fritz, who has something of a sideline in gorgeous photography of CPU and GPU dies. If you zoom into one corner of the top metal layer you can apparently see a revolver firing a bullet, right next to a map of Texas. The Texas bit may well be a reference to AMD's facilities in Austin Texas. The gun and speeding bullet? Well, that's anyone's guess. Whatever, it was the Athlon K7 that arguably first shot AMD onto an equal footing with Intel for performance. Not only did it launch with the same 600MHz peak clockspeeds as the Pentium III of the day, it actually offered superior performance in some benchmarks. And that's including the applications that majored on floating point performance, which were previously the preserve of Intel's finest CPUs. As it happens, it's not a huge surprise to learn that none other than Jim Keller, widely regarded as one of the leading chip architects of recent decades and the man behind AMD's current series of Zen CPU architectures, had a hand in K7's design. Anyway, long story short, K7 proved to be faster than Pentium III in Quake III, and that's really all that matters, right? AMD K7 gun etching (Image credit: FritzchensFritz) For fun, you can check out the Quake III benchmark numbers in Anandtech's original review with the Athlon K7 clocking up just under 120fps while the Pentium III lumbers along below 100fps. Ouch! Just to provide some context and an idea of how far we've come since the K7, it was built on a 0.25 micron process, which essentially means 250nm, and contained 22 million transistors. Your next upgrade Nvidia RTX 4070 and RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics cards (Image credit: Future) Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD. Best gaming motherboard: The right boards. Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits. Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest. The latter was actually the highest to date at the time, further underlining that K7 wasn't just there to snag some low-end budget PC sales but was intended to make AMD a real contender for premium performance for the first time. Today, AMD produces CPUs on 5nm and 4nm TSMC nodes and its Phoenix APU contains 25 billion transistors. AMD also overtook Intel when it comes to market cap, or the overall value of a company according to its share price, in June 2022. Today, AMD is worth about $270 billion to Intel's $180 billion, an eventuality that would have been very, very hard to believe back in 1999, especially when you consider that Intel had a similar market cap in 1999 to that which is has today but AMD was only worth a couple of billion. PC Gamer Newsletter Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors. [ ][ ]Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands[ ]Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors[Sign me up] By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Jeremy Laird Jeremy Laird Social Links Navigation Hardware writer Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go "ping!" He also has a thing for tennis and cars. More news A merry-go-round in RuneScape. 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