https://www.theamericanmarksman.com/american-marksman--50-cal-m1022-lr-sniper-650-gr--50-ct.html

Any opinion on this ammo??

I'd love to try some but can't swing that price

I'll have an article on these for Very High Power Magazine, but that won't appear in print for a few months.

What AmMark is selling is their own loading of the M1022 bullet design that was a modified PPI (French).  AmMark got the bullets from ammo they pulled down that was originally produced by Lake City.  Apparently AmMark has had these bullets for quite a while, with all the various projects that they had underway, and finally got around to doing them into ammo.

The other M1022 bullet mentioned was the design proposed by Winchester.  The Winchester contender was a solid brass bullet with a bored-out tip to cause the Center of Gravity to be farther back in the bullet than it ordinarily would.  Since the Winchester design wasn't picked, they sold off the ammo they had left over and the remaining bullets.  Those bullets were loaded by HSM and sold as match ammo quite some time ago.  Also, the now defunct TTI Armory had a match load that utilized a very similar bullet, so the TTI & HSM loads look virtually similar and those look a lot like the WCC version of M1022.

M1022 was originally designated as a COTS acquisition.  Circa the early 2000's.  It had to be a Commercial Off The Shelf product, the Army didn't want to pay to develop something from scratch.  After something like 10 years of development of a COTS product, Army stopped funding it as it was just taking too long.  The PPI design was modified several times during development of the M0122 so it really was no longer a COTS type of acquisition.

M1022 was supposed to be merely a match grade .50 loading with no pyrotechnic load, no incendiary, no tracer, no HE, etc.  A match grade ball load, basically.  It was to be for use in training, where the Mk211 wasn't wanted (frag potential of target pullers in the pits, for example) and for tactical uses where the Mk211 wasn't needed or wanted.  While the original PPI design was a super armor piercing bullet, the M1022 offspring wasn't required to be AP.  Its core was, in fact, just zinc, not even mild steel.  As zinc corrodes just like steel, the bullet had to be coated to prevent deterioration.  

The original PPI design was unique in that it wasn't a traditional core of some kind surrounded by a copper jacket.  It had, basically, a copper cup instead of a jacket and the core sits in this cup, so much of the core is not covered by any kind of jacket.  To make this work, the core is roughly mushroom shaped, a short stem (thinner core section, held in the cup) with the rest of the bullet just being exposed core.  Difficult to describe, but I'll have pix in the article to help.

We had gotten a few of the Athena rounds at Barrett quite some time ago. I have one in my oddball .50 can.

In all of the brain dump I did, I never really addressed the Original Poster's question......

Not much in the way of actual "shooting" feedback to provide on the M1022 at this point.  It was a military requirement, and the project only just got out of XM status to M status before it was cancelled due to time and cost to provide the finished design.  So just specs to work from on how it should have performed, only the guys on the project knew for sure how it was doing.  So now that there's a civilian version available (probably not for long based on the current market and how the Mk263 got sucked up), we'll see how it performs.  It's new to the market, just released this past week, so will take time for a track record.

And yes, the original PPI was an interesting concept.  It was straight up an AP design, which is odd as everyone wants more and more out of their ammo in the military.  AP performance of the PPI was superior to the old M2 AP, the M8 API, Mk211 API, even the SLAP round in thick steel.  While everyone was chasing smaller and smaller bullets being pushed faster and faster to get improved penetration, along comes a French company that thinks the answer is to put out the biggest AP core you can think of (eliminate some of the jacket to do so) and run it at normal .50 velocities, to improve AP penetration.  They succeeded.

But the M1022 was only an offspring of PPI, it doesn't have a hardened steel core, not even a steel core, just plain zinc.  So against armor it'll just go splat.  It was just a military version of match grade ball.

Original specs called for M1022 to provide sub-MOA group sizes (AMR or ES not specified), 892 m/s (2927 fps) M/V.

Thank you for sharing your wealth of knowledge! I really love hearing the inside stories and history of projects like this.
That's the kind of round that would interest me, personally, as I like many others appreciate the caliber for its armor penetration capabilities more than anything else.
Since this particular offering doesn't offer any AP ability whatsoever, really, I think it's appeal will be relegated more to people looking for accuracy performance, but then again there's always the AMAX bullet of a factory loaded accurate round is what you want.
So to me, I just don't see much of an appeal for this round. That said, I would definitely like to have a couple due to their uniqueness and interesting back story. Too bad they're not selling any 10 round boxes.