That AMD’s purchase of ATI would affect the graphics circuit manufacturer’s product assortment is already certain, but exactly to what degree is not. Anyway, it seems that AMD has already influenced the chipset segment. Thanks to our forum user metro, which is also a writer at Chilehardware, we now have access to new roadmaps from AMD and ATI about their coming chipsets. He’s published a series of slides from a product presentation called “AMD ATI Chipset Update”.
If we’re interpreting these slides correctly it seems that ATI with AMD as the chief won’t launch any more chipsets for Intel’s platform. ATI RD600 will most likely be the last chipset for Intel’s platform and after that its AMD and Socket AM2/AM2+ all the way. The roadmap starts of at the beginning of 2007 and there we can see four different chipset which will be important to Socket AM2; RD580 for the enthusiast market, RX690 for the enthusiast and mainstream market while RS690 is mainly mainstream and RS690C for the budget market.
If wee look further ahead towards the second half of 2007 AMD’s new platform, Socket AM2+, appears with support for HyperTransport 3 and the new K8L architecture. For this purpose ATI has updated its equivalent circuits from Socket AM2. ATI RD790 will replace RD580 and should be launched about the same time as the RX790 chipset for the enthusiast and mainstream market. A little later the two RS chipsets with integrated graphics circuits should appear. RS790 comes with an integrated graphics circuit sporting DirectX 10, while RS740 has to settle for DX9.
At Chilehardware there are more slides and it’s pretty clear that AMD and ATI will have a solid foundation for their processor platform. Now we’ll just have to hope that the processors will keep with the current development.
