ATI targets next-gen Athlon 64 FX with four-GPU chipset?

Roadmap ATI leak neatly coincides with AMD's

By Tony Smith, 6th October 2006

ATI will target AMD's Socket AM2+ interconnect with its RD790 chipset - a part with the abiility to host four graphics cards, allegedly leaked company roadmap slides reveal.

Socket AM2+ is expected to debut in Q3 2007 so support the HyperTransport 3.0 bus AMD's K8L 65nm dual- and quad-core processors. The ATI slides, posted by Spanish-language site ChileHardware.com, claim the graphics chip company that's soon to be AMD's GPU division will support AM2+ with four chipsets: running from bottom to top, the RS740, RS790, RX790 and RD790.

The RD790 and RX790 are pitched at the enthusiast market and the upper end of the mainstream segment. They're likely to target AMD's 'Altair' and 'Antares' processors. The RD790 will host four x8 PCI Express slots, though there's the option of running two x16 connectors.

It will also support Socket F+, the 1207-pin Opteron-oriented interconnect that AMD's also expected to use for its K8L-generation quad-core Athlon 64 FX chips.

The RX790 supports a single graphics card slot - an x16, presumably.

In Q4 2007, ATI will ship the RS790 and RS740, AM2+ chipsets respectively targeting AMD's dual-core 'Arcturus' K8L chip and its Sempron-class 'Spica'. Both are integrated chipsets, the RS790 with a DirectX 10 graphics core, the RS740 with a DirectX 9 engine, the slides indicate.

The RS740, RS790 and RX790 are all said to be pin-compatible with the upcoming RS690 chipset, part of ATI's pitch for business during the first half of 2007. ®