AMD's RS690T, SB700 notebook chipset: details emerge

Details of AMD's next-generation South Bridge chip, the SB700, have leaked out. With them, the chip maker's plans for its latest notebook reference platform, codenamed 'Trevally' - designed, it seems, to take Intel's 'Santa Rosa' Centrino head on.

The gen comes via a Spanish-language report at ChileHardware. Apparently, Trevally comprises the said SB700, the the RS690T North Bridge and a Socket S1 Turion 64 X2 processor.

The RS690T - surely set to ship as the M690 if past hints at AMD's new chipset nomenclature are anything to go by - provides not only an integrated graphics core with access to its own, dedicated DDR 2 graphics memory bank, but also PCI Express lanes for an 8x graphics card connection, a 4x link to the SB700 and a number of 1x links to other add-ins.

The SB700 has ports for 12 USB 2.0 devices, two USB 1.1 add-ons, six SATA drives, parallel ATA and PCI add-ons. It also has the usual power management and HD audio support. Interestingly, the reference design also incorporates a Flash module on the ATA bus - presumably to support Windows Vista's ReadyDrive Flash cache technology.

There's a SIM-card slot too, connected via a Mini-PCI slot hanging off Trevally's USB tree. Since Trevally's a reference design, how many of these features will make it into shipping notebooks remains to be seen. Networking support comes not through the SB700, but from a PCIe card connected via the RS690T.

How far off all this is is not yet known, but with the RS690 due to be announced next week, according to source close to AMD, it can't be far off.