14 DAY TRIAL // Chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices has announced its plans to launch five different southbridge products to go with its latest chipset. The SB700 southbridge chip was expected for some time now, but nobody would have expected to come accompanied by four other southbridge products that will offer quite some new features.
All the AMD chipset-based motherboards are built with the extremely old SB600 southbridge. The upcoming SB700 chip will replace it in all the product configurations and will bring extended functionality to the motherboard. However, the manufacturer seems to have run intro some supply issues with the new and shiny chip, but there is a high chance that the southbridge will arrive just in time for the official unveiling of the RS780 chipset in March.
The SB700 chip is situated at the bottom of the series and, of course, will be the cheapest one. The next southbridge is the SB710 that adds OverDrive 3.0 overclocking capabilities to the motherboard. The SB750 should be situated at the top of the list, and comes with integrated support for RAID5. Estimations show that it will be widely implemented on the RS780-powered motherboards.
Furthermore, the SB710, SB700s and SB750s southbridges are the first chips to integrate both the clock generator and the Super I/O controller. The integration would reflect in reduced motherboard prices and at the same time, in a less crowded design. The SB700s and SB750s chipsets will power server motherboards and will put RAID5 on top of all features.
Moreover, all the southbridges will come with full support for AMD's upcoming HybridFlash technology, that is built on Samsung's OneNAND Flash. This feature will allow for a similar result as Windows Vista's Turbo Memory or ReadyBoost.
The SB700 series of southbridges will come with 12 USB 2.0 ports, two USB 1.1 ports, six SATA connectors and six PCI slots.