ATI doesn’t have the same strong position on the motherboard market as NVIDIA where the nForce 5xx chipset series has been pretty much exclusive during the testing of AMD’s new AM2 platform. But ATI has launched its own chipsets for the AM2 platform and its high performance chipset is simply the Crossfire Xpress 3200, which is already available for the Socket 939. With suppport for AM2’s DDR2 memory and 940 pin socket they’ve made it possible for motherboard manufacturers to also use Xpress 3200 with AMD’s new platform. It has also announced that it will launch the Radeon Xpress 1100 chipset with its fastest integrated graphics circuit so far.
Radeon Xpress 1100 will be used with both AMD’s stationary platform AM2 and the mobile equivalent S1, which we’ve earlier reported sport this platform’s DDR2-667 memory and an integrated graphics circuit with DirectX 9.
It’s also good to see that ATI has now launched the longed southbridge SB600, which seems to be a better partner for ATI’s new circuits. SB600 sports everything from 10 USB2.0 ports and a high resolution sound circuit to 4 SATA-II slots with support for RAID and NCQ.
“The SB600 also makes use of disk controller technologies such as the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) with native command queuing (NCQ) to provide super-fast access to data storage, making games, applications, and files load faster. In Windows Vista, the new controller also ensures blazing disk performance on AMD systems using the native AHCI driver – something that’s only supported today on ATI platforms.”
