ATI's RD600 chipset for Intel processors will launch next month, it has been claimed. Whether motherboard makers will back the product now that ATI is on the verge of being subsumed into Intel competitor AMD remains to be seen.

The chipset had originally been scheduled to debut in August, a DigiTimes report claims. Certainly, sample RD600-based mobos had been seen long before that time.

RD600 is expected to support a 1066MHz frontside bus, but it's believed to be able to auto-overclock the FSB up to 1.5GHz. The chipset's auto-overclocking feature also takes in the PCI Express bus and the memory - which is clocked independently of the CPU and FSB, it has been alleged in the past.

The chipset has also been said to support three x16 PCI Express slots: two for graphics cards in CrossFire configuration and the third for another GPU intended to be dedicated to game physics processing.

Actually, thinking about it, such a system could also form the foundation for science and engineering computations, and we can't help but wonder whether ATI's planning to stream into that arena too, particularly given AMD's interest in the sector. Each of the three GPUs are, effectively, highly parallel computing tools, and if that processing ability can be leveraged by game physics, it can also be used by other modelling applications, from oil well analysis to chemical synthesis. ®