AMD's upcoming Socket M2 desktop CPU interconnect has surfaced on the internet, revealed in all its 940-pin glory on MSI's K9N Platinum motherboard. You can view the snaps here.

The board clearly sports an Nvidia chipset, so there's no doubt it's going to support the new interconnect when it debuts - in Q2, if rumours, leaks and pointers on AMD's own website are to be believed.

The pin-out is a 31 x 31 array with 21 holes blocked at the corners and other portions of the grid, making a confirmation count of M2's pins a doddle. Yes, it is indeed a 940-pin connector.

The pictures come courtesy of Dutch-language site Tweakers.net, which was first to the web with shots of AMD's other future interconnect, Socket F, in November 2005.

M2 will be accompanied by updated AMD processors with an on-board memory controller that supports DDR 2 SDRAM. It's expected to be accompanied by Socket F, for the company's Opteron 2xx and 8xx server processor lines, and Socket S1 for notebook systems. ®