Our good friends on the hardware and gaming sites have, yet again, alerted us to certain facts we should know. And, at the same time, AMD was responding to pix of the K7 cartridge with a definite "no-comment". Meanwhile, Iranian president Katmai was welcoming US president Clinton as a friend of the federation of American states. So it's all very confusing, which is what AMD likes to love. Robert Stead, Euro AMD marketing director, told us today that a picture on Firing Squad's site "looked like" it was an AMD part, but how could he possibly know whether or not it was. But meanwhile US hardware specialist JC cited a report from an evaluator who claims to be from Prudential Insurance with a K7 in his mitts. According to JC -- based in fabulous New York City -- the Prudential guy claims yields are very good and AMD has already shipped nearly 2,000 of the beasties, which use the Alpha EV6 bus. As the Alpha consortium has stuff running at 800MHz, as reported here on Sunday, using the famous Ironside chipset, this all seems very good news for AMD. We and others, including DEC analyst Terry Shannon, reported at the end of last year that AMD would use Ironside. But at The Register, many of us are still of the somewhat sceptical and Scottish belief that AMD should concentrate on its very profitable Flash memory. It has a joint venture with huge Japanese company Fujitsu. So, if it capitalised on that stuff, it would have more than a fighting chance against Chipzilla. AMD's stocks and shares were rising at press time. ®