Upcoming ATI and NVIDIA Socket AM2 Chipsets
 

DailyTech has received an AMD roadmap that highlights upcoming Socket AM2 chipsets from ATI and NVIDIA. According to AMD’s June 2006 roadmap ATI has a new discrete graphics solution that should arrive in Q3’06. Currently known as RX690, the new chipset will have one PCI Express x16 graphics slot. RX690 lacks the capability to divide the 16 PCI Express lanes to two PCI Express x8 slots. There’s no mention if CrossFire will be supported with RX690 but it seems very unlikely. Nevertheless the RX690 supports six PCI Express lanes instead of the four lanes supported by current Radeon Xpress 1100/1200, CrossFire Xpress 1600 and CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipsets. RX690 based motherboards will have access to a variety of PCI Express based south bridges including ATI’s SB460 and SB600.