This is pretty interesting news this morning. Digitimes is saying that ATI has plans to introduce a new lineup of chipsets for the AMD Socket M2 in 2006. They first mention the new ATI RD580 and RD580C chipsets, which we first saw mentioned at the recent ECS Editor’s Day (see below) and from what we here these will have two full x16 PCIe connections to compete against the NF4 SLIX16 chipset. There is also mention of a new integrated chipset, the RS and RX485 parts, both still based on ATI’s current X300 core technology. Both of these sets of chipsets are supposed to be ready by the end of the year.
For future integrated video solutions, it looks like the RS690 is going to upgrade the video core a bit and be ready sometime in Q2 of next year. What type of GPU we will see in here is up is still a mystery, but we’ll keep looking around for more info on that.
What is kind of disappointing is that there is no mention of an upgraded south bridge yet, which is really the one area where ATI is lacking in contention with the NVIDIA chipset department. They already have good performance from their north bridge, so all they need is the improvements in a new south bridge and some more prominent design wins and they might put some pressure on ‘big green.’
ATI is preparing the RD580 and RD580C for the high-end segment, with the chipsets supporting ATI’s crossfire dual-graphics card technology, the source indicated. The two solutions will compete against Nvidia’s nForce4 SLI (scalable link interface) series. According to ATI’s roadmap, volume production is slated for the end of this year, but sources stated the company will need to adjust its roadmap and bring it in line with AMD’s M2 launch schedule.